Careers

Work on software that moves milk through a plant.

Milkeon is small and at the design stage. The roles below are the ones the first design-partner deployments need. They open as the cohort forms; there is no openings count to inflate.

Four role shapesPlant floor and GPUFood safety first

run_scn_01 · agent graph · scenario 10 nodes · 1 approval gate
01 · orchestrator intake.receive ✓ SUCCEEDED 02 · orchestrator twin.simulate ✓ SUCCEEDED 03 · intake_separate separate.standardize ✓ SUCCEEDED 04 · pasteurize_homog pasteurize.verify ✓ SUCCEEDED 05 · ferment_culture culture.vat ✓ SUCCEEDED 06 · evaporate_dry dry.spray ✓ SUCCEEDED 07 · defect_inspect inspect.pack ✓ SUCCEEDED 08 · hygiene_cip cip.schedule ✓ SUCCEEDED 09 · orchestrator approve.human ◆ APPROVAL 10 · quality_conf release.genealogy ✓ SUCCEEDED

Illustrative scenario: Plant run · skim-milk-powder line + set-yogurt line · shared intake. Not a measured run.

Roles

Where we need people

Each role is written as a shape, not a job ad with a requisition number.

Vision and spectral models at the line

Founding engineer · plant-edge perception

Own the camera and analyzer pipeline: contamination, fill and seal vision, NIR and mid-IR composition models, TensorRT and Triton serving on Jetson, and the latency budget that makes a reject decision useful.

What you bring

  • Shipped computer vision or spectral models to production hardware
  • Comfort with CUDA, TensorRT, Triton and edge deployment
  • Patience for calibration against a lab

Connectors to PLC, SCADA, MES and lab systems

OT integration engineer

Build the connectors that read separators, pasteurizers, vats and dryers and write guarded setpoints back, without ever touching an interlock. Own the allow-lists, rate limits and the audit record of every write.

What you bring

  • Industrial automation experience in food, dairy or another regulated process industry
  • PLC, SCADA, historian and MES integration
  • Respect for critical control points

CFD, heat and mass transfer, fermentation models

Simulation engineer · process twin

Build Lactwin: GPU-accelerated simulation of separation, heat exchange, evaporation and spray-drying, surrogates that run at the edge, and the reconciliation that keeps the twin honest against real runs.

What you bring

  • Process simulation or CFD background, ideally with GPU acceleration
  • Omniverse, Modulus or comparable physics-ML tooling
  • A taste for validating models against messy plant data

The craft the models learn from

Dairy process technologist

Translate between the plant and the platform: define what in-spec means per product, review agent recommendations in assist mode, design the food-safety and ROI gates, and sit with design partners on the floor.

What you bring

  • Years in dairy processing: separation, pasteurization, culture or drying
  • HACCP and quality-system fluency
  • Willingness to teach a model what you know
How we work

Six things about working here

Trust before autonomy

Grounding, audit, human-in-the-loop and graduated control come before any write to a line.

Every correction trains the system

A technologist's correction is a labeled training event, not a complaint.

Land narrow, expand relentlessly

One line and one number first. The plant and the group follow the number.

Food safety is not a variable

Critical control points, interlocks and release decisions stay with the plant's HACCP plan and its people.

Tenant isolation is a design rule

Recipes and supplier data never cross a customer boundary. On-prem is an option, not an exception.

Evaluation gates every change

Golden datasets and model-as-judge evaluations gate model and prompt changes in CI.

Run timeline

What you would be building

Every Milkeon run is an ordered, inspectable sequence. This is run_scn_01, an illustrative scenario: Plant run · skim-milk-powder line + set-yogurt line · shared intake. Scenario complete · both streams inside spec · one human approval at the dryer.

run_scn_01 scenario · not measured SUCCEEDED
  1. 01 intake.receive SUCCEEDED 0.9 s

    Plant Orchestrator · Pulled both product specs, the HACCP plan with its pasteurization critical control point, the antibiotic screen for the tanker lot and the standing CIP window from MES and the lab system; locked the target envelope for the run.

  2. 02 twin.simulate SUCCEEDED 41 s

    Plant Orchestrator · Simulated 24 candidate recipes across separation, pasteurization, evaporation and spray-drying on the Lactwin as-processed twin; ranked them on composition margin, pasteurization margin, energy per kilogram of powder and takt, and discarded every candidate that thinned the pasteurization margin.

  3. 03 separate.standardize SUCCEEDED 3 m 05 s

    Intake-and-Separate · Fused inline NIR and mid-IR with the latest lab calibration, then trimmed the cream-skim split and the standardization blend valve so skim solids and the yogurt-stream fat sat at target with the minimum safe margin rather than the usual over-standardization.

  4. 04 pasteurize.verify SUCCEEDED continuous

    Pasteurize-and-Homogenize · Held HTST at or above 72 °C for 15 s through the holding tube with the flow-diversion valve armed; every critical control point reading was written to the audit log against the HACCP plan.

  5. 05 culture.vat SUCCEEDED 4 h 20 m

    Ferment-and-Culture · Predicted the acidification curve for the culture lot from inline pH and the upstream composition, held the vat temperature profile and timed the hold so pH landed on the set-yogurt target curve; no abnormal acidification was flagged.

  6. 06 dry.spray SUCCEEDED 2 h 10 m

    Evaporate-and-Dry · Ran the dryer against the twin's moisture and stickiness prediction; stepped inlet temperature and feed solids toward the minimum-energy setpoint while predicted outlet moisture stayed inside spec and fouling risk stayed low.

  7. 07 inspect.pack SUCCEEDED continuous

    Defect-and-Inspect · 16 camera streams across the two packing lines at the plant edge: fill, seal, cap and label checks on every unit, foreign-body and contamination models on the powder stream; two rejects were attributed back to a seal-jaw temperature drift and the packing line was notified.

  8. 08 cip.schedule SUCCEEDED 6 s

    Hygiene-and-CIP · Placed the pasteurizer and dryer CIP into the cheapest energy window, sequenced wash phases against tank availability and set the release checks that must pass before the next product.

  9. 09 approve.human APPROVAL 1 m 48 s

    Plant Orchestrator · The twin's lowest-energy candidate wanted a dryer inlet temperature above the site's bounded envelope. Held for the shift dairy technologist, who approved the step with a tighter outlet-moisture alarm.

  10. 10 release.genealogy SUCCEEDED 1 m 12 s

    Quality-and-Conformance · Both batches released: composition, CCP records, culture lot and pH curve, drying setpoints, inspection rejects and every human decision written to the batch genealogy and checked against spec.

Process

How hiring runs while the team is small

  1. A conversation. What you have built or run, and which of the four shapes fits.
  2. Something real. A working session on a dairy-plant problem from the product: a separation line, a dryer, a vat or a packing line.
  3. The team. Time with the people you would work with, on the floor where possible.
  4. A decision. Fast, in plain language, either way.
Accelerated computing

Physical AI, at the plant edge

Milk is perishable and the lines are continuous, so perception has to be local and fast. Milkeon runs GPU inference at the plant edge and keeps training, simulation and optimization in the cloud, in a private cloud or on-prem. Items marked planned are on the roadmap, not running.

Jetson Orin / Thor · DeepStream · Holoscan · TensorRT

Edge perception

8 to 24 camera and inline-analyzer streams per line. Design target: 50 to 150 ms reject and alert decisions, 250 to 1,000 ms composition estimates, all at the plant edge.

Triton · NIM

Model serving

Defect, composition, shelf-life, process-state and dairy-reasoning models behind one orchestrator, with version routing by product, line and sensor package. Design target: 10 to 40 concurrent models per plant.

DGX / HGX · NeMo

Training (planned)

Vision, spectral, time-series and dairy-reasoning models fine-tuned from labeled batch outcomes, operator corrections, lab results and validated deviations. Initial design target: 2k to 10k GPU-hours.

Omniverse · Modulus · OVX

Digital twin (planned)

GPU-accelerated CFD and process simulation of separation, heat exchange, fermentation, evaporation and spray-drying, run as-processed before the batch to find safe, low-energy recipes.

Cosmos · Omniverse Replicator

Synthetic data (planned)

Rare contamination, foreign-body, fouling, seal, fill and drying-upset scenarios generated with domain randomization and always validated against real plant events before use.

cuOpt

Optimization

Product sequencing, tank allocation, dryer scheduling, CIP timing, energy and water constraints and line balancing, recomputed on the GPU when the plant is disrupted.

Isaac · Jetson

Robotic handling

Packaging, palletizing and material handling for product, packs and pallets, with perception and motion policies built in simulation before they touch the packing hall.

Autonomy

Four stages, set per loop

A plant does not go from manual to bounded control in one step. Milkeon makes the stage explicit per loop, auditable and reversible at any time, and some decisions never leave the person.

Autonomy stages and the human role at each
StageWhat the agent doesWhat the person doesWhen
ShadowPredicts composition, contamination, moisture and takt; writes nothingRuns the plant as today; compares predictions to lab resultsFirst phase with every design partner
AssistRecommends separation, pasteurization, culture and drying moves with the evidenceA dairy technologist or process engineer approves or corrects each oneAfter accuracy is proven against the baseline
BoundedWrites low-risk separation, drying and inspection setpoints inside explicit limitsApproves anything above the limits; reviews the shift recordAfter the food-safety and ROI gates agreed up front
ExceptionsEscalates anything outside its envelope, CCP-adjacent moves and release decisionsAlways decides these; the agent never doesPermanent
From the plant floor

Who this is built for

The three people in a dairy plant whose week changes when the process runs itself, and what each of them needs from Milkeon.

Economic buyer

Plant or Operations Director

Owns production rate, quality, loss and yield, energy and water, and food safety. Wants a plant that holds spec at higher rate with fewer interventions, and a number that justifies the spend.

Champion

Dairy Technologist or Process Engineer

Owns separation and standardization, pasteurization, culture and drying recipes, process windows and yield. Approves and corrects the agents in assist mode; those corrections train the models.

Approver

Quality and Food-Safety Manager

Owns HACCP, FSMA, ISO 22000 and FSSC conformance, composition and contamination conformance, and batch genealogy. Needs every action grounded, cited and written to an immutable record.

IT/OT and sustainability leads approve the deployment. There are no customer quotes on this site yet; design partners will speak for themselves when they choose to.

Guardrails

An agent that can move a setpoint needs a leash

Milkeon writes to production equipment in a food plant. Every capability is scoped, every write is policy-checked, every output is cited, and every action is written to an append-only audit log the plant owns.

  • Bounded action space. Each agent can only write to an explicit tag allow-list, inside per-tag rate and magnitude limits, at the autonomy stage the plant has set.
  • Critical control points are read, never written. Pasteurization time-temperature, flow diversion and release decisions stay with the HACCP plan and the people who own it.
  • Policy engine before every write. Autonomy stage, interlock state, product, shift and operator presence are evaluated before a setpoint moves.
  • Grounded and cited. Every recommendation carries a citation to the recipe, spec or procedure it relied on. Retrieval is tenant-isolated and permission-aware.
  • Immutable audit log. Append-only, exportable and retained on the plant's own storage, aligned to HACCP, FSMA, ISO 22000 and FSSC record-keeping.
  • Hard fallback. If the edge node, the network or a model stops, the plant keeps running on its existing PLC and SCADA control and interlocks.
  • Tenant and IP isolation. Recipes, supplier data and tolerance models never cross a customer boundary. On-prem deployment available.

Assurance posture

Assurance and certification status
ItemScopeStatus
SOC 2 Type ICloud control plane QUEUED Roadmap, first 6 months
SOC 2 Type IICloud control plane QUEUED Roadmap, 6 to 12 months
HACCP · FSMA · ISO 22000 · FSSC · CodexGrounding and record-keeping RUNNING Design basis for retrieval and the audit log
Per-tenant isolationData, memory, models RUNNING Design rule
On-prem deploymentRecipe-sensitive producers RUNNING Design option

Milkeon supports your food-safety records. It is not a certification and it does not replace your HACCP plan.

Read the security overview

FAQ

Straight answers

The questions plant directors, technologists and quality managers ask in the first meeting.

Only at the autonomy stage your plant has set, and only to an explicit allow-list of low-risk loops inside explicit limits. Every design partner starts in shadow mode, where Milkeon predicts and writes nothing. Assist mode follows, where a technologist approves each recommendation. Bounded autonomy on separation, drying and inspection loops comes after the food-safety and ROI gates agreed up front.

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