Automation Engineer

Large Manufacturing company is seeking an Automation Engineer in the Lexington, KY area.

The primary responsibility of this role is to develop and implement innovative activities, improving manufacturing competitiveness and reducing fixed costs in North America

What you'll be doing

• Collaborate cross-functionally with robotics engineers, controls engineers, and plant manufacturing teams to integrate AI into production systems.
• Identify, evaluate, and implement emerging Physical AI technologies through benchmarking, supplier engagement, and industry events.
• Ensure solutions meet safety, reliability, and manufacturability requirements, including alignment with applicable standards and internal risk assessments.
• Present technical concepts, results, and recommendations to stakeholders, management, and executive leadership.
• Manage contractors to design and construct testing cells.
• Produce clear, detailed documentation to support future scaling and customer enablement.

Requirements

Qualifications

What you bring

• Bachelor's or master's degree in Robotics, Computer Science, Data Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related technical field (or equivalent experience).
• Demonstrated experience with manufacturing automation deployments.
• Experience in robotics, AI/ML, or advanced automation development.
• Having a full-stack mindset while working in team environments building complete solutions, not just independent AI algorithms, demonstrations, and experiments.
• Strong hands-on experience in at least two of the following: Computer vision (e.g., detection, segmentation, 3D perception)
• Machine learning / deep learning
• Robotics
• Proficiency in Python, C++, ROS-based systems; strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Deep understanding of different sensor types (RGBD cameras, LiDAR, Time-of-Flight sensors, etc.) and the ability to tune for image quality accuracy and performance.