AI/ML Engineer – Manufacturing Vision Inspection Systems

Toyota is hiring an AI/ML Engineer to lead end-to-end engineering and deployment of automated quality inspection systems for its North American manufacturing facilities. The role develops and trains vision models, deploys and optimizes them on production and edge systems, integrates them with manufacturing systems, and sustains their reliability.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement computer vision models for defect detection, segmentation, and classification
• Accelerate training cycles using synthetic data, active learning, and domain randomization, including for rare edge-case defects
• Package models with Docker and manage deployments via Kubernetes (K8s) or equivalent orchestration
• Implement MLOps practices — version control, rollback strategies, and observability for latency, lighting drift, and false-positive/negative rates on production lines
• Optimize inference for edge/embedded hardware (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson, Intel accelerators) to meet real-time latency requirements for moving-line inspection
• Maintain consistent performance across varying lighting, optics, and surface conditions
• Integrate vision systems with PLCs, encoders, triggers, and industrial networks using OPC-UA, MQTT, and REST
• Align deployments with Toyota’s ICS+, GALC, and TVIP architecture standards for plant-level connectivity and reliability
• Lead defect image collection campaigns, manage annotation workflows, and set quality gates for model validation
• Use synthetic data pipelines and augmentation to improve robustness and reduce training time
• Meet uptime/availability targets through proactive monitoring, calibration (MSA), and backup/restore processes
• Implement drift detection, audit false negative risk, and conduct root cause analysis for inspection failures
• Pioneer new deflectometry, reflection, and multi-camera imaging technologies to elevate vehicle surface quality control
• Lead inspection booth software deployments from concept through SOP (Start of Production)
• Evaluate optical AI solutions through on-site plant trials, compiling data for North American rollout
• Collaborate across NAMCs, Toyota Motor Corp (TMC), Toyota Technical Center (TTC), PE support shops, IT (One Tech), automation teams, and Enterprise AI divisions