Autonomous Field Test Engineer

Job Responsibilities

• Serve as the lead for reproducing field issues, debugging, documenting, prototyping, and system testing of new technologies.
• Formulate conclusions and make recommendations.
• Work closely with all Blue River and John Deere engineering teams to establish holistic tests and drive feature improvements.
• Plan and guide the integration of complex multidisciplinary robotic systems, collaborating with multiple groups of engineers across Blue River and John Deere.
• Evaluate product failures using advanced engineering techniques.
• Integrate and/or install software at a system and subsystem (component) level.
• Perform exploratory testing to understand potential test plan gaps.

Required Experience And Skills

• 2+ years of experience testing high-tech vehicles, robotics, or agricultural products.
• Familiarity with maintenance, repair, and reprogramming of heavy equipment.
• Experience within agriculture operations, operating various types of machinery.
• Experience translating system and customer needs into testable requirements.
• Solid understanding of software complexity and system architecture interaction.
• Advanced experience with complex systems development; hardware- and software-focused understanding of meeting high-level systems needs.
• Capable of creating the documentation for system validation; experienced in complex systems support.
• Scrupulous and persevering; demonstrated ability to be successful in uncertain situations, and high degree of agility and creativity to adapt and react to learnings.

Preferred Experience And Skills

• Linux familiarity, including script programming, CANbus networking and Ethernet networking.
• Excellent brainstorming, creative thinking and communication skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to operate, plan, and execute within the presence of uncertainty.
• Experience debugging electro-mechanical and/or perception systems.
• Comfortable working independently and within teams, in parallel, and asynchronously across team boundaries, with developers and field engineering across products, features and components, in parallel.
• Maintain good rapport with customers and vendors.
• BS or higher in Engineering or related field.
• Design of agricultural equipment.
• Experience with documentation and tracking tools such as Jira, Confluence, Google Docs.
• Experience with code source, build management, and deployment systems (Github/Gerrit, Jenkins, Artifactory).
• Skills in Python or other language.