Work at Blissway: Opportunity for Impact Every Day 🚀✨
Blissway is a startup that simplifies toll collection and dramatically improves highway safety. We are multiple startups in one: Deep Tech, AI/ML, Hardware, SaaS, and IoT. For the past five years, we have built a nearly insurmountable technological lead in tolling, a roughly $200B global industry expected to double in the next decade. We work for toll authorities and state DOTs, and we own the whole system, from the roadside camera to the final bill, so every vehicle we see becomes one accurate toll transaction and nothing more. While our competitors have thousands of employees, we operate with a lean but growing team of less than 30. Our impact is visible on the massive Interstate Highway System connecting every major US metro (except Juneau, AK—sorry, Juneau).
You are a good fit if...
You love the grind: You take ownership and put in the time to meet deadlines. Our recent team survey showed an average of 55 hours/week, with occasional 70+ hour bursts for major releases.
You are detail obsessed: You have experience writing code, designing or building systems that stands up to the unpredictability of the physical world, where the small details are the difference between success and failure.
You are adaptable: We are a lean team. If you only want to work on a "niche thing" or are uncomfortable helping other teams when they need a boost, this isn't the place for you. We expect you to figure out what you need to get stuff done.
You code really well: We mostly use Python and TypeScript, but we don’t care what you’re most proficient in today—as long as you learn fast.
You value working together in person: You’re excited to work alongside the team at our Denver office. This role is in-office on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, with flexibility to work remotely on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The Mission: Every image on our system has one job: complete an accurate toll transaction through our billing system. Your job is making that transaction more accurate. We process 11 million images a day, using detection, segmentation, classification, embeddings, and re-identification to match each vehicle to its toll. You'll find where our models fall short, decide what to fix first, and build the fix, from dataset curation to custom state-of-the-art architectures. This role is for the engineer who reads a new paper and immediately wants to know if it works in the real world.
The Work
Own the Model: Data collection, dataset curation, design, training, and evaluation. Your job is making sure the model is correct, working closely with our MLOps Engineer to get it to production.
Vision at Real Scale: 11 million images a day across vehicles, license plates, axles (so we classify each vehicle correctly), and lane markings. At this volume, the right model can drastically improve accuracy and cut cost at the same time.
Classical CV to Custom SOTA: Our toolbox spans traditional computer vision algorithms through custom-trained state-of-the-art models. You pick the right tool, and if nothing off the shelf is good enough, you design and train your own.
Build the Best Models That Exist: We read the papers, go to the conferences, and hold our work to the current frontier. ML has become essential to Blissway over the past year, and this team is where that bet gets made real.
Real Hardware in the Real World: We own the devices in the field, so any idea you have can be built and tested on real roads.
Small, Fast, Accurate: As we push inference onto roadside hardware, you'll design models that are fast, small, and power-efficient without giving up accuracy.
How We Handle Data: We work only for toll authorities and state DOTs, on legislatively authorized toll roads. The laws governing our work prohibit keeping data unless it's used to charge a toll. There is no search-by-plate interface, no cross-agency lookup network, and no standing law enforcement access. Data leaves our system only through the same legal process that applies to any company's billing records.
Requirements
Experience: 2 to 6 years of software engineering with a focus on computer vision, or a recent PhD or master's with research in computer vision or machine learning.
Real CV Depth: Experience with modern computer vision and the judgment to know when a classical technique beats a heavy model. You're not reaching for a transformer when a filter will do.
Hands-On Training: You've trained, fine-tuned, and debugged models on real-world, custom data, not just benchmark datasets.
Strong Engineering: You write clean, production-quality code. Experience shipping models to production is a strong plus, but if you're coming from research, show us code you've built that others actually use.
Python: Fluent in Python and its ML ecosystem.
Bonus: Experience optimizing models for edge hardware, or working on vehicle detection, license plate recognition, tracking, or poor lighting and weather conditions.
The Interview Process
We're a selectively small team, which means a deliberate and thorough interview process with 3-4 interviews and a final paid work trial. In exchange, you get real autonomy from day one, direct access to the people setting technical direction, and work that ships to roads in weeks, not quarters.
The Essentials (Health & Wealth)
Relocation Support: We are excited for you to join the team at our engineering office in Denver. We value in-person collaboration and daily team lunches and we provide a relocation bonus to help you get here.
Personalized Health Coverage (ICHRA): We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all healthcare. We provide a monthly allowance for you and dependents so you can choose the individual plan that actually fits your life.
Investing in Your Future: 401(k) matching up to 4%.
Peace of Mind: Transparent compensation. Company-sponsored life & disability insurance.
Early Stage Equity: Competitive equity package. Every year, we facilitate a tender process that gives you the opportunity to sell your vested shares at the same valuation as our investors.
Rest & Recharge 🌴
High-Trust Time Off: 4 weeks of untracked PTO. We don't micromanage your calendar; we focus on your impact. Take the time you need to stay sharp and inspired.
Family First: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for birth and adoptive parents. We want you present for the moments that matter most.
The Deep Breath (Sabbatical): Every 5 years, take 12 weeks of fully paid leave. Go travel, write a book, or master a new hobby—then come back and tell us all about it.
Fuel & Community 😀
The Blissway Kitchen: Whether it’s breakfast to start your day or our daily group lunches, we keep the team fueled.
Snacks Autonomy: Our kitchen is fully stocked and we mean it—if we’re missing your favorite fuel, just add it to the request list.
The "BlissTrip": An annual 4-day getaway for the team and significant others.
Monthly Beats: Game nights, escape rooms, and dinners to celebrate the grit we put in.
Continuous Learning: Tuition reimbursement for courses, programs, and conferences that sharpen your craft.