What are the responsibilities and job description for the QA & Technical Support Engineer (Contract) position at Orchard?
Orchard Robotics is a seed-stage startup backed by top VCs like General Catalyst, Contrary, Mythos Ventures, Soma Capital, Humba Ventures, and angel investors like Howard Lerman (founder of Yext).
We're securing America’s food supply by building the AI farmer that automates our nation’s farms. We've started by gathering critical data to provide detailed insights for every tree, at billion-fruit scale, to help our farmers farm more profitably, efficiently, and sustainably.
We are the most advanced technology on the farms we work with. Farmers are using our technology today in some of the largest farms in the nation.
Background
We build AI-powered camera systems that mount to the top of tractors and other farm vehicles. As farmers drive these vehicles through their farms on a daily basis, our cameras take millions of pictures, imaging every tree we pass by. We run over 20 AI models onboard our cameras to analyze each image and collect valuable data for our farmers. For example, we can tell them how many fruit are on each tree, fruit size, color, disease detection, growth rate, canopy size, tree trunk locations, and much more!
However, all this data is useless unless farmers can actually use it in their day-to-day operations. When a farmer is managing hundreds of millions of fruit on thousands of acres, it’s critical they can easily understand what is happening on every tree, block, and acre of land. So all this data, collected in individual "scans" of their farms, gets processed and uploaded onto our web data platform, where farmers can take action on their data.
As we scale to customer sites nationwide, and our cameras collect hundreds of scans every day, we're looking for a detail-oriented and technically skilled QA / Technical Support Engineer to ensure the quality, reliability, and timeliness of our data delivery.
This is a contracted, remote position requiring availability during nighttime hours in the continental United States.
About The Role
As Orchard Robotics’ first QA / Technical Support Engineer, you will play an important role in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of scans captured by our AI-powered camera systems.
You will start by manually performing quality assurance checks on customer scans, flagging issues or bugs to our core operations and engineering teams, providing direct communication with customers, and documenting feedback.
Over time, you will leverage your technical skills to build tools, dashboards, and automated workflows to streamline these processes, ultimately improving efficiency and data integrity.
Key Responsibilities
Data Quality Assurance:
We're securing America’s food supply by building the AI farmer that automates our nation’s farms. We've started by gathering critical data to provide detailed insights for every tree, at billion-fruit scale, to help our farmers farm more profitably, efficiently, and sustainably.
We are the most advanced technology on the farms we work with. Farmers are using our technology today in some of the largest farms in the nation.
Background
We build AI-powered camera systems that mount to the top of tractors and other farm vehicles. As farmers drive these vehicles through their farms on a daily basis, our cameras take millions of pictures, imaging every tree we pass by. We run over 20 AI models onboard our cameras to analyze each image and collect valuable data for our farmers. For example, we can tell them how many fruit are on each tree, fruit size, color, disease detection, growth rate, canopy size, tree trunk locations, and much more!
However, all this data is useless unless farmers can actually use it in their day-to-day operations. When a farmer is managing hundreds of millions of fruit on thousands of acres, it’s critical they can easily understand what is happening on every tree, block, and acre of land. So all this data, collected in individual "scans" of their farms, gets processed and uploaded onto our web data platform, where farmers can take action on their data.
As we scale to customer sites nationwide, and our cameras collect hundreds of scans every day, we're looking for a detail-oriented and technically skilled QA / Technical Support Engineer to ensure the quality, reliability, and timeliness of our data delivery.
This is a contracted, remote position requiring availability during nighttime hours in the continental United States.
About The Role
As Orchard Robotics’ first QA / Technical Support Engineer, you will play an important role in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of scans captured by our AI-powered camera systems.
You will start by manually performing quality assurance checks on customer scans, flagging issues or bugs to our core operations and engineering teams, providing direct communication with customers, and documenting feedback.
Over time, you will leverage your technical skills to build tools, dashboards, and automated workflows to streamline these processes, ultimately improving efficiency and data integrity.
Key Responsibilities
Data Quality Assurance:
- Perform nightly QA checks on 100 scans coming from many camera systems.
- Execute standard checklists including GPS accuracy, scan completeness, and data integrity.
- When necessary, monitor camera processing queues and proactively identify issues.
- Spot-check scans via remote camera access (over remote SSH) and our FruitScope data platform.
- Document and communicate detailed feedback to customers, operations teams, and engineers.
- Identify repetitive QA tasks and automate them through scripting, dashboards, and software tools.
- Develop dashboards and tracking systems to improve visibility and monitoring efficiency.
- Continuously optimize QA processes to enhance data quality and turnaround time.
- Manage clear communication with customers regarding scan status, issues, and resolutions.
- Collaborate with customer support representatives, engineers, and operations teams to address and resolve technical issues.
- Create, resolve, and manage support tickets in our HubSpot CRM.
- Support onboarding of new customer accounts and farms onto our systems.
- Conduct QA testing of FruitScope features and performance.
- Provide detailed feedback to engineers to ensure FruitScope meets customer needs and quality standards.
- Technical proficiency with scripting languages (Python, Bash, etc.) and familiarity with Linux/SSH.
- Experience or interest in developing automation tools and dashboards (experience with tools like Grafana, Tableau, or similar is a plus).
- Strong attention to detail
- Ability to manage repetitive tasks effectively
- Passion for process improvement, and a solution-oriented mindset.
- Excellent communication skills for direct interactions with customers and internal teams.
- Experience with ticketing systems (HubSpot, Jira, or similar) is beneficial.
- Experience with using AI tools (such as Windsurf or Cursor) is a plus.
- Be part of a pioneering team revolutionizing precision agriculture through cutting-edge AI technology.
- Opportunity to shape QA processes and automation frameworks from the ground up.
- Work directly with multiple teams including engineers, operations, and customers.
- We’re deeply motivated by the impact we’re making – every line of code written or new system built means one less fruit that goes to waste, and one more person who is fed.
