Technical Lead Manager - Production Engineering
Apptronik · Austin, United States · 1mo ago
Apptronik is a human-centered robotics company developing AI-powered robots to support humanity in every facet of life. Our flagship humanoid robot, Apollo, is built to collaborate thoughtfully with people, starting with critical industries such as manufacturing and logistics, with future applications in healthcare, the home, and beyond.
We operate at the cutting edge of Applied AI, applying our expertise across the full robotics stack to solve some of society's most important problems. You will join a team dedicated to bringing Apollo to market at scale, tackling the complex challenges like safety, commercialization, and mass production to change the world for the better.
JOB SUMMARY
Apptronik's Production Engineering team owns the engineering last mile — turning humanoid subsystems into a fully functioning, field-ready system and commissioning it on site under a Factory Acceptance Test (FAT). We are seeking a Manager to build and lead this new organization: a hands-on technical leader who sets the bar for deployment, integration, and reliability while growing and directing a cross-disciplinary team of software support, site-reliability, and hardware-configuration engineers. Reporting to the head of Infrastructure Software and working closely with the org's Architect, you will own the delivery of robots to Robot Park and customer sites — beginning with Apptronik's first external deployments — and be the technical and operational anchor for the team as it scales.
ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
- Team Leadership: Build, lead, and grow the Production Engineering team — software support, site-reliability, and hardware-configuration engineers — setting priorities, mentoring, and owning execution and quality.
- Last-Mile Ownership: Own the engineering last mile end to end — integrating subsystems into a working humanoid and driving it to acceptance under Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) at Robot Park and customer sites.
- Deployment Delivery: Champion on-site deployment, bring-up, and commissioning for internal and external customers.
- Reliability & Uptime: Establish the standards, tooling, and on-call practices that keep a growing fleet running under real-world field conditions.
- Fleet Deployment & Observability: Own centralized deployment and rollout across the fleet — canary, staged, and cascading — and the observability and monitoring that make rollout a decision, not a guess.
- Technical Direction: Set technical direction for provisioning, configuration management, networking, and fleet tooling, making architecture and prioritization calls in partnership with the org's Architect.
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner with Commercial, Service & Support, and the PMO to align deployment schedules, site requirements, and hand-offs.
- Process & Scale: Define lightweight, repeatable processes — sprint cadence, deployment playbooks, and FAT criteria — that scale as the team and customer base grow.
SKILLS AND REQUIREMENTS
- Proven technical leadership — leading engineers and owning delivery of complex, cross-disciplinary systems.
- Deep hands-on experience deploying, integrating, and commissioning complex hardware/software systems in the field, ideally robots.
- Strong systems breadth across Linux, networking (DDS/UDP/TCP), provisioning and configuration management (Ansible), and software (C++/Python).
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management; able to represent the team to senior leadership and customers.
- Sound judgment under pressure at customer facilities against demanding timelines and SLAs.
- Willingness to travel to deployment sites, up to 25% during active deployments.
- Formal people-management experience — hiring, developing, and directing a team.
Bonus Qualifications:
- Direct humanoid, manipulation, or teleoperation domain experience.
- Experience standing up a new team or function from scratch.
- Experience with ROS 2, containerization/CI-CD, and fleet-management tooling.
- ML / MLOps in the field — model fine-tuning, post-training pipelines, or dispatching training jobs (VLA / embodied-AI workflows).
- Warehouse and industrial systems integration (WMS / WES / MES / WCS).
- Cloud infrastructure and fleet backend services.
- Deep back-end experience — TypeScript and Kubernetes.
- Deep front-end experience — React, CSS, and interface design.
EDUCATION and/or EXPERIENCE
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or equivalent experience.
- 8+ years of software / robotics engineering experience, OR 4+ years of direct humanoid, manipulation, or teleoperation domain experience, including time in a lead or ownership role.
- Demonstrated experience owning on-site deployment and commissioning of complex systems.
- At least 2 years formal managerial experience leading or mentoring engineers and driving cross-team execution.
PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS
- Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer
- Must be able to lift 15 pounds at times
- Vision to read printed materials and a computer screen
- Hearing and speech to communicate
*This is a direct hire. Please, no outside Agency solicitations.
Apptronik provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.