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Overview.ai is deploying GPU-powered AI computer vision systems on manufacturing production lines to solve inspection problems that traditional machine vision cannot handle. The company operates a full-stack platform: edge-deployed cameras, on-device inference, and a cloud platform managing fleets of devices globally.
You will own the San Francisco lab as a Machine Vision Applications Engineer, responsible for imaging feasibility assessment before customer deployments. Your core work involves receiving customer samples and proving that the imaging setup (lighting, lenses, cameras, geometry) can reliably detect defects. This hands-on role is the foundation of every successful deployment and currently represents the bottleneck between customer problems and deployed solutions.
Day-to-day responsibilities include:
- Running imaging trials and feasibility studies on incoming customer samples across automotive, aerospace, and consumer manufacturing
- Selecting and configuring lighting, lenses, cameras, filters, and optical geometry for each application
- Setting up and operating the SF lab: establishing test standards, managing hardware inventory, sample handling, and result documentation
- Building and documenting proof-of-concept tests that provide Sales and Applications with defensible answers on system capabilities
- Troubleshooting image quality issues that cause false rejects, missed defects, and inconsistent results
- Evaluating new cameras, lenses, and lighting hardware and recommending additions to the stack
- Writing clear technical documentation of findings, trade-offs, and lessons learned for future engineers
This is positioned as a mid-level role with a clear path to becoming the technical voice on imaging as the lab and team scale. You will see more diverse imaging problems in one year than most engineers encounter in five, working on genuinely difficult inspection challenges that have defeated traditional approaches.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Hands-on experience selecting and configuring lighting, lenses, and cameras for parts inspection or measurement
- Experience running imaging trials, feasibility studies, or proof-of-concept testing on customer or production samples in a lab or demo environment
- Working knowledge of optical trade-offs: lens selection, field of view, working distance, depth of field, and resolution
- Comfortable working directly with hardware, running independent experiments, and solving problems autonomously
- Ability to document findings clearly and explain technical trade-offs to customers and internal teams
- Based in San Francisco Bay Area or willing to relocate; able to work primarily from SF office
STRONG PREFERENCES:
- Experience imaging difficult parts (reflective, specular, transparent, dark, or low-contrast surfaces)
- Experience with advanced lighting techniques (dome, dark field, backlight, coaxial, polarized, structured lighting)
- Experience with telecentric optics and precision measurement
- Customer-facing technical work (demos, application support, on-site troubleshooting)
- Experience troubleshooting inspection performance in production (false rejects, missed defects, image quality variation)
- Familiarity with traditional machine vision software tools (Cognex, Keyence, Matrox, Halcon, Dalsa)
