Sabanto

Robotics Engineer (Perception)

Itasca, ILMid LevelFull-TimeRobotics EngineeringPosted

Sabanto is a venture-backed, Illinois-based technology company on a mission to drive autonomy into agriculture.

We believe the agriculture industry's lack of labor will drive the adoption of Farming-as-a-Service companies using autonomous equipment. It's this very spirit that drives us to build a robotic machinery platform, delivering a service that brings unprecedented efficiency, productivity, and cost to farmers. Join our fast-growing, industrious, and passionate team of innovators as we continue to disrupt the multi-billion-dollar agriculture industry.

As a Perception-focused Robotics Engineer at Sabanto, you will be building the sensing and perception systems that let autonomous tractors and other agricultural equipment see and understand the world around them. You will take real sensors from the bench to production field environments — dust, glare, rain, crop canopy and all — and turn their data into a reliable picture of the world that our navigation, safety and control systems can trust.

RESPONSIBILITIES & OUTCOMES

  • Design, build and harden perception pipelines — obstacle detection, classification and tracking — that keep autonomous agricultural equipment operating safely in the field

  • Integrate real sensors (cameras, LiDAR, radar, GNSS/IMU) onto tractors and implements, including drivers, intrinsic/extrinsic calibration and time synchronization

  • Fuse multi-sensor data into a dependable world model that feeds navigation, safety, control and sequencing systems

  • Evaluate, select and integrate third-party sensors and perception vendors, from bench prototype through production deployment

  • Deploy and optimize computer vision models on edge compute within real-time latency, thermal and power constraints

  • Build data collection, labeling and evaluation pipelines from field logs to measure and improve perception performance across crops, seasons, lighting and weather

  • Triage, reproduce and resolve perception issues seen in the field using recorded sensor data

  • Occasional travel to observe and refine perception systems at customer sites

  • Write tested, hardened and safe code — unit tests, replay tests against real field data, and on-vehicle validation before every change ships

QUALIFICATIONS

  • Bachelor's in computer science, robotics, electrical engineering or a related field

  • Strong quantitative, analytical, and problem-solving skills, with comfort in geometry, linear algebra and probabilistic estimation

  • An entrepreneurial attitude with a keen eye for detail

  • Can code with and without AI help.

  • Organized, disciplined, and can manage multiple priorities simultaneously

  • Industrious – ideally can drive, or willing to learn to drive, tractors, and anything with four wheels

  • Ag-gnostic – Excited about learning the ag industry, understanding what's important to farmers and helping them be successful with our offerings

DESIRED EXPERIENCE

  • 5+ years building perception, computer vision or other real-time sensing applications, with a track record of shipping to production hardware outside the lab

  • Mastery of C++ and/or Python

  • Mastery of ROS/ROS2, including sensor drivers and high-bandwidth message pipelines

  • Hands-on experience integrating and calibrating real cameras, LiDAR and/or radar in production environments

  • Experience with computer vision and point cloud libraries (OpenCV, PCL, Open3D or similar)

  • Experience training and deploying deep learning models for detection or segmentation on edge hardware (PyTorch, ONNX, TensorRT, NVIDIA Jetson or similar)

  • Experience with sensor fusion, state estimation and multi-object tracking (e.g. Kalman filters)

  • Experience working with Geospatial data a plus

  • Familiarity with functional safety standards for autonomous machinery (e.g. ISO 25119, ISO 18497, ISO 13849) a plus

  • Experience working with Docker-based software and build pipelines a plus

BENEFITS

At Sabanto, every member of our team moves the needle. With a firm footing in our core company values, we've built a fast-paced, demanding work culture that allows for the flexibility, autonomy, and career opportunities you'd expect from a growing company. We offer competitive benefits including:

  • Working on a concept that will forever disrupt the agriculture industry

  • The chance to make an immediate impact and do the best work of your life

  • Unlimited Vacation and flexible time

  • 401k, medical, dental

OUR CORE VALUES

  • Own It - Be self-driven, entrepreneurial, and efficient

  • Raise the Bar - Challenge complacency and mediocrity; be adaptable and agile; details matter

  • Be As One - Trust, collaborate, and support; invest in co-workers and customers

  • Embrace Curiosity - Always be learning, be curious and share; be humbled but not embarrassed by mistakes

  • Do the Right Thing - Act with integrity, even when no one is looking; be transparent

  • Empower Farmers - Create solutions where customers, i.e. farmers, win

At Sabanto, we value diversity of culture and background for the benefit of our employees, our products, and our community. Sabanto is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. This position is open to applicants who are legally authorized to work in the United States.

We are not able to sponsor work visas at this time

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Robotics Engineer (Perception)
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