Lead AI Automation Engineer - Autonomous Construction

Caterpillar Inc.; Irving (TX); On-site; USD 128,000 - 209,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Paid time off

401(k) plans

HSA

FSAs

Career development

Bonus

Relocation assistance

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

Caterpillar Inc. is seeking a Lead AI Automation Engineer to guide a scrum team building automated annotation and captioning for robotics, autonomy, CV, and Vision-Language-Action systems. You’ll blend software, ML, and data engineering to deploy scalable labeling and QA solutions on real-world heavy equipment.

You’ll work on AI models, data pipelines, and platforms like NVIDIA Cosmos Curator to enable automated labeling, captioning, and data-driven improvements at scale in a production setting.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, AI, ML, Robotics, or related field.
• Experience leading technical delivery for software or AI engineering teams.
• Experience developing production-grade software using Python and modern practices.
• Experience designing distributed systems, APIs, and data pipelines.
• Experience training, fine-tuning, or deploying ML models.
• Strong problem-solving skills across technical disciplines.
• 3+ years creating/ managing camera and LiDAR datasets for perception or ML.
• 3+ years data annotation and QA for autonomous systems or CV projects.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical execution of a scrum team focused on annotation automation and AI-driven data production.
• Design, develop, and deploy automated labeling and captioning solutions for perception and VLA datasets.
• Train, fine-tune, and evaluate AI models to support auto-labeling and QA automation.
• Build data pipelines and workflows for automated labeling, human review, QA, and publication.
• Extend platforms like NVIDIA Cosmos Curator and Cosmos Reason and other AI automation tech.
• Integrate Caterpillar data systems with external annotation providers and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Drive reliability, scalability, observability, and operational excellence of annotation services.
• Mentor engineers and provide day-to-day technical leadership.

Skills

Leadership

Python

Distributed systems

Data pipelines

ML models

Problem solving

Cross-functional collaboration

AI automation

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Labelbox

Supervisely

RoboFlow

PyTorch

TensorFlow

ONNX

Weights & Biases

MLflow

Job description

Caterpillar Inc. is seeking a Lead AI Automation Engineer to guide a scrum team building automated annotation and captioning for robotics, autonomy, CV, and Vision-Language-Action systems. You’ll blend software, ML, and data engineering to deploy scalable labeling and QA solutions on real-world heavy equipment.

You’ll work on AI models, data pipelines, and platforms like NVIDIA Cosmos Curator to enable automated labeling, captioning, and data-driven improvements at scale in a production setting.