We receive a great deal of interest from recruitment agencies, we do appreciate the desire to work with us. We advertise current job vacancies on our website to enable potential candidates interested in joining our team to connect directly with us.
When direct sourcing is not possible, we may opt to engage a recruitment agency from our preferred supplier list.
If you feel you have a candidate who fits the requirements outlined in a job advertised on our website, we kindly request that you send their CV for review exclusively to recruitment@dogtoothtech.com.
If we would like to discuss further with you, we will be in touch.
This interesting documentary feature was created by Freethink, who approached us late 2022 to appear in their series, “Hard Reset” which focuses on companies and people taking revolutionary approaches to help solve the world’s biggest challenges.
We had the pleasure of welcoming Director Nick Tucker and his film crew to our facility in October to take a closer look at our intelligent robots, find out what makes them unique, and to capture them in action picking fruit on a UK farm.
At Dogtooth, we believe it’s incredibly important to engage and inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists, and our team did exactly that last week at our facility in South Cambridgeshire.
The Cambridge 50th Cub Pack joined us for an action-packed visit filled with hands-on learning and exploration. The Cubs rotated through a series of activity stations in small groups. They got creative with a design challenge aimed at solving real problems in crop surveying, and ventured into the polytunnel for a paired hand–eye coordination game and a mini pick-your-own punnet session. They also had the opportunity to control robotic arms in our “arm farm,” getting a feel for the technology we use in the field. While there weren’t any patents granted, a few Dogtooth branded caps were proudly awarded — and the strawberry ice-cream we made from our surplus strawberries certainly went down well.
There’s real value in giving young people the chance to see our robots up close, and to show that in addition to plastic, copper and steel, the modern world is built from genius, enthusiasm, hard work – and fun!
Would you like to be part of building a brand new industry?
We are looking for a talented Manufacturing Engineer to (ME) to help drive the R&D efforts of our rapidly growing technology business.
Dogtooth is a Cambridge-based technology start-up specialising in autonomous robotics for fruit harvesting. Founded nine years ago, we have successfully developed, manufactured, and deployed five generations of strawberry picking robot on farms in Europe and Australia. Our team combines considerable expertise in manufacturing, mechanical, electronics and software engineering, and machine learning computer vision.
Initially this will be a short term (3 month) role with the potential to extend.
The role
As our ME, you will:
Oversee our internal and supplier manufacturing processes to ensure we produce high quality robots and ancillary equipment.
Champion lean, standardised work principles emphasising safety, quality, and productivity.
Develop and operate processes for the assembly and testing of subsystems and fully working robots and other ancillary equipment.
Collaborate with R&D to influence the simplicity of robot manufacture and translate designs into well designed work that achieves its design intent.
Work with field operations, R&D, suppliers, and outsource partners to resolve quality problems and improve their processes to meet quality and delivery requirements.
Duties and Responsibilities
Immediate:
Support and participate in our manufacturing activities to understand the robot and its testing
Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for the manufacture of existing and new released designs
Ensure this is the adopted current best way of performing our work
Developing into:
Implementation of Standardised Work based on standard work sequences and cycle times
Continuously improve our processes
Working with Purchasing on the implementation of new designs and procurement of new parts
Working with the manufacturing director and other stakeholders to create efficient processes to support direct manufacturing. E.g. calibration and measurement, Production Parts Approval Processes (PPAP) etc.
Desirable characteristics
Attention to detail, and able to identify which details need to be added
Disciplined, thrives in cadenced environments, has a sense of urgency
Sets and works towards sensible milestones
Likes simple solutions
Follows the scientific method and is data driven in problem solving
Able to draw correct balance between following process and knowing when to intervene/escalate problems
Personable, emotionally intelligent, confident talking to suppliers, design authorities
If you would like to apply, please send your cover letter and C.V. to recruitment@dogtoothtech.com addressed to Sarah.
We are looking for a DevOps Engineer to join our team and help us to increase the speed and quality of our software & machine learning releases, as well as helping us to automate and improve the reliability and security of our data processing pipelines and our back-end systems.
This role will work closely with our Software CTO, and alongside our Linux Systems Administrator to simplify, standardise and automate our workflows, both internal support systems as well as external customer-facing systems.
Duties and Responsibilities
Develop and manage software and automation solutions (including CI/CD pipelines) to help increase the velocity of the Software and Machine Learning teams.
Lead the way in replacing and obsoleting manually managed on-premise servers and services, and replacing them by IaC (Infrastructure as Code) alternatives.
Be metrics driven to ensure that we can assess and improve on scalability, reliability, observability, and security aspects of our systems.
Implement automated deployment pipelines and configuration management tools to streamline the deployment process.
Desirable Characteristics (strong candidates are likely to tick most – but not necessary all – of these)
5+ years’ experience as a DevOps Engineer or similar role.
Previous start-up or scale-up experience.
Strong understanding – and hands on experience of – DevOps principles.
Hands-on experience with the following tech stack: Linux, Docker, Python, AWS, Azure DevOps.
Strong communication skills.
Proficient in scripting languages for automation tasks.
We are looking for a candidate available to start as soon as possible.
To apply, please send your CV and cover letter to recruitment@dogtoothtech.com addressed to Sarah.
The successful applicant will help us to translate our Engineering plans into practice and bring experience and best practice Software Engineering principles to the business.
Duties and Responsibilities
Lead the way – and be a strong advocate of – best practice software design patterns, software architecture and agile methodology.
Take a lead in our effort to re-architect and harden our code to prepare for 10x-100x scale.
Mentor junior software engineers.
Help the team to find the right balance between strong principles and pragmatism; and help the team to inform “buy vs build” decisions.
Be the standard bearer for code quality (including software test coverage and maintainability of code).
Desirable Characteristics (strong candidates are likely to tick most – but not necessary all – of these)
10+ years’ experience in software engineering.
10+ years’ experience with C# and .NET.
Previous experience with Linux, Python and Azure DevOps.
Previous experience in both start-ups / scale-ups and larger organisations.
Strong communication skills.
Previous experience in robotics or other hardware-based products.
We are looking for a candidate available to start as soon as possible.
To apply, please send your CV and cover letter to recruitment@dogtoothtech.com addressed to Sarah.
We are looking for a highly motivated, curious and hard working individual that would fit within our outstanding multidisciplinary team. You can be a university student or a recent graduate, passionate about technology and eager to improve the state of UK and European agriculture and technology. Your work will contribute to addressing world-wide food security through the means of scalable and autonomous fruit-picking robots.
Overview of the role
You will work alongside our software and test engineers, delivering and improving various software products, such as dashboards that analyse robot performance, Computer Vision and Machine Learning infrastructure and applications, software to manufacture and test robot parts, and of course the core logic for selecting and picking strawberries.
Duties and responsibilities
Take responsibility to build and maintain applications relevant to the software team.
Visit customer sites and provide engineering support, as well as collect feedback from the field to improve our products.
Support other engineers in their work.
Help with performance analysis and improvement of our robots, utilise and advance our performance models.
Give periodic presentations on the work you’ve done.
Desirable characteristics
Pragmatic, first-principals approach to analytical problem solving.
Strong degree in STEM, with knowledge of statistics, linear algebra, analysis.
Experience with robotics, hardware or firmware.
Willingness to give and receive honest, impartial feedback.
Experience with programming languages such as C#, python, SQL, bash.
Ability to learn quickly and effectively in a variety of fields.
Strong communication skills, ability to defend your point of view and consider other opinions.
Interest in cutting edge technology.
To apply, please send your CV and cover letter to recruitment@dogtoothtech.com addressed to Sarah.
As I approach the end of my industry year at Dogtooth, I’ve been reflecting on everything I’ve experienced – from technical lessons to unexpected personal growth. I wanted to share my time here, both to document it for myself and to offer insight into what working at Dogtooth is really like.
My Background
I came to Dogtooth looking for an industry year. I wanted a career that combined my love of programming with my love of the outdoors and agricultural robotics seemed like a really good start towards this. Dogtooth felt like exactly what I was looking for. It also provided some interesting ideas: the idea of working towards a new kind of farming with less reliance on mono-crops, less food waste, and although not as strictly related to their work, less reliance on herbicides and pesticides. The idea of automating food production pulled on a political chord in me too, a chance to see what the people working at Dogtooth saw in a future where their product was commonplace.
I also wanted to develop some new skills, especially around electronics and firmware and I wanted to get my foot in the door at a pleasant company so I had somewhere to turn to after university.
What I Learned at Dogtooth
From my first month at Dogtooth I started learning a wild amount. I’d basically been dropped into a new career space and had a lot to take in. Although I joined the software team I was also assigned an electronics and hardware tutor who would meet up with me once a week to help me develop the additional skills I wanted to learn. This was done even though I wasn’t working in that space! This tutoring was amazing and really gave me a lot. Having one-on-one time with someone was so valuable; any question I had was not only answered quickly but in a way that really integrated itself into my understanding well.
I also found that I very quickly learnt a lot about how an entire electronic rig, like our robots, is structured. Learning how a computer can work, manage and run electronic parts really blew my mind! It turns out, our robots have tens of embedded-systems computers inside them, each managing different parts, communicating with a main central computer through a networking system. I’d gone into this assuming there were just chips with massive sets of GPIO pins connecting to all the arms and rails at once. The more I dug into the robots as I worked with them, the more I learnt about the depth of their functioning and the systems Dogtooth has built around them.
Through the job I picked up an insane amount of knowledge about the stuff I was already working on in my life outside of work. To list just a few things off the top of my head: the insane depth of C#’s inner workings and flexibility, Python’s weird little quirks, all the tools and processes for maintaining and running servers and real time data services, and a massive amount just working with a relatively old codebase; seeing what we can do well and badly to ensure the code stays robust and maintainable for years to come.
The Unexpected Lessons
More interestingly, I got a large number of things from my time at Dogtooth that I wasn’t looking for such as interesting views into other worlds and other ways of working. A nice little example of why we should always be pushing ourselves to try new experiences.
An Ego Check
Dogtooth has been a great place for working slightly above my skill level and regularly making mistakes and learning. As an agile company it’s really open to failure and does really well at leaning into a blameless culture. This has been really good for keeping my ego tuned down, regularly reminding me that I don’t know everything, and that I’m surrounded by highly experienced people whose knowledge runs impressively deep. There was a lot of challenging work but my line manager very quickly made sure that I felt I was able to say “I don’t know how to do this, but I’ll give it a go as long as people are willing to help me when I need it”. Developing that kind of knowledge based humility whilst still being willing to undertake tough work feels like a really important skill that I’m glad I developed and I felt like it was definitely at the core of how Dogtooth treats its interns.
Working in a Team with a Range of Opinionated Views
People at Dogtooth are great at their job, and this comes with confidence. They know how to solve a problem and will fight for their view. Coming into these teams and seeing sets of 4-5 people consolidate their mass of widely different points through discussions, compromise and friendly jokes and somehow seeing them all come together in a clean, realistic and reasonable form is incredible. I had moments when I first joined Dogtooth where I’d see this and it would leave me in a really positive mood for the rest of the day. Just being around people as ideas fly and get slowly thinned out through genuine expert discussion is really comforting, especially nowadays when it’s easy to think people with adverse opinions just can’t get on. Dogtooth is really solid evidence against this.
A View into Manufacturing
Dogtooth is a very small company but needs to have a full production team. A nice benefit of this is that this means you have a really wide range of people but everybody still knows everybody. This has given me a chance to get a view into areas of work I would never have otherwise even thought to learn about. This especially applies to manufacturing where the head of the department, has a long and well-established background in the field. Talking to him about this has been profoundly eye-opening. A really interesting view into an industry that’s actually very good at organising humans and solving human problems. Just seeing the whole process a product goes through, from R&D to production to the planning of mass production has been super educational and shown me a whole chunk of the real world I’d never have got to see otherwise.
An Unusual and Sincerely Pleasant Working Environment
A smaller thing, but Dogtooth is just a really lovely environment. I really hoped to get some outdoor manual labour mixed in with my coding whilst working here and I’ve definitely got it. Helping out while a whole team of really lovely people tear-down or rebuild poly-tunnels, weed plants or clear out containers has just been really pleasant. Being able to go and sit outside while working on my laptop on summer days or just having to sit outside whenever a robot needs testing makes Dogtooth a really unique place to work in a really good way; there’s almost a whimsy to it. That whimsy is also added to by having an infinite supply of strawberries to eat during the summer.
I kind of like to think that this is a bit of a window into what computing could be in a world where Dogtooth’s industry is thriving. The programming community definitely needs to be more willing to go outside and Dogtooth sometimes teeters on showing what that could look like. It’s a bit reminiscent of some sort of solarpunk utopian story.
Final Thoughts
That final point definitely ties into my feelings on Dogtooth generally. Working at Dogtooth for a year has really shown me the kind of environments I want to work in. In terms of my future goals and career aspirations, it’s definitely convinced me I want to stay in agri-tech, especially as it continues to grow and carves out its own space. Hopefully it becomes a place with a strong tie to nature, a trust in its workers and an understanding of its own identity. I think Dogtooth is moving in that direction well and I’m definitely hoping to return eventually.
Dogtooth is thrilled to announced the appointment of Jorge Heraud as chairman of our board.
Having achieved a significant inflection point in robot productivity, we are now equipping our first customers to adopt dexterous harvesting robots at scale. As we embark on this exciting next phase of our journey, we are hugely fortunate to be able to benefit from Jorge’s experience and wisdom.
To members of the agricultural robotics community, Jorge will need little introduction. He co-founded and served as CEO of Blue River Technology, a company that uses computer vision and AI to detect plants individually and reduce chemical use. After Blue River was acquired by John Deere in 2017, he became their VP of Automation and Autonomy, leading a team of over 600 people. Earlier in his career, he worked at Trimble Navigation International Ltd as Director of Engineering and Business Unit Director for Precision Agriculture. He holds master’s degrees in both engineering and business from Stanford University.
Dogtooth’s fifth generation robot was featured in a recent Financial Times article. We are enormously proud to be a part of Dyson Farming ‘s efforts to produce sensational British strawberries this Christmas.
We are looking for a talented lead electronics engineer to head our electronics delivery, working as part of our exceptionally skilled and multi-disciplinary technology team. You will be responsible for (i) developing all electronic sub-systems used within our robots, including those for 3D imaging, sensor monitoring, safety management, and motor control, (ii) compliance with the relevant CE and EMC regulations as defined by our quality engineer, (iii) managing the electronics development process. (iv) managing the electronics roadmap
We were thrilled to be one of 16 finalists, selected from over 100 entries across the UK, to participate in the inaugural Future of Food competition.
The competition brought together some of the country’s most innovative food and farming businesses, with each finalist invited to pitch their ideas live to a panel of industry experts and decision-makers at the historic Royal Geographical Society in London.
Future of Food Creator, Barney Mauleverer said, “The mega trends of the future – rising sea levels, shifting populations, threats to our economy, farming and climate, even space tourism are undeniable. But the food industry has a unique opportunity to lead the charge in solving these seismic shifts and crises. It’s incredibly inspiring to see so many young, up and coming innovators forging ahead.
Without the strength of big brands or budgets behind them, they’re making waves, pushing boundaries and showing the incredible talent this industry has to offer. That’s exactly what the Future of Food competition is here to celebrate: their passion, drive and game changing potential.
Dr Duncan Robertson, Founder & CEO of Dogtooth Technologies, leads a pioneering team that has spent eight years developing robots capable of harvesting delicate berry fruits as effectively as human pickers.
Well done to Duncan and the team on winning the Bronze Award!”
Dogtooth is thrilled to be featured in Interesting Engineering‘s recent documentary alongside other innovators pioneering the use of new kinds of robots in agriculture. With a shortage of skilled harvest labour, the global horticultural industry faces unique challenges. Growers are adopting new technologies to ensure crops are harvested efficiently and Dogtooth’s robots are at the forefront, helping to create a more sustainable and resilient future for farming. Dogtooth is now selling its fifth generation robots to growers around the world. If you’re interested in robotic harvesting on your farm, we’d love to talk to you.
