Senior Product Manager - Perception & Navigation

Senior Product Manager, Perception and Navigation
Location: Austin, TX (on-site)

A well-funded, venture-backed humanoid robotics company building AI-powered robots designed to work alongside people, starting in manufacturing and logistics, with future applications extending into healthcare and beyond. The company operates across the full robotics stack and is focused on bringing its humanoid platform to market at scale.

Job Summary
Drive product vision for the perception and navigation stack, ensuring seamless execution across the hardware/software divide, and translate market demands into user-oriented, executable product roadmaps.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and maintain the perception and navigation software roadmap: scope, sequencing, and feature priorities across detection, tracking, localization, mapping, and obstacle avoidance.
• Drive the technical definition of the perception stack, turning sensor inputs into the scene understanding and world state the autonomy and model layers rely on.
• Define evaluation metrics and field-testing regimes: detection, tracking, localization, and mapping accuracy, latency budgets, and success/regression criteria that gate releases.
• Own requirements for perception data pipelines, including collection, labeling, and the feedback loop from field deployments.
• Lead product requirements for safe perception: reason through failure modes, validation coverage, and autonomy risk.
• Co-design within the compute envelope: account for edge deployment constraints, latency, and on-robot performance, partnering closely with the sensing and compute team.
• Define and prioritize use cases based on business impact, feasibility, and customer needs.
• Ensure product development aligns with real-world economic value for customers.
• Synthesize insights from user research, customer meetings, usage data, and sales feedback into strategy.
• Work with industrial design, UX, and engineering to conceptualize and implement interactive features.
• Communicate requirements to engineering teams via clearly written documents, diagrams, and verbal communication.
• Support product marketing and partner relationships to accelerate adoption.

Requirements

• 7+ years of product management experience.
• Strong grounding in perception and navigation fundamentals: detection, tracking, localization, mapping, and obstacle avoidance.
• Demonstrated experience defining evaluation metrics, field-testing regimes, and performance tracking for autonomy or perception software.
• Field deployment experience taking perception or autonomy software from the lab into reliable real-world operation.
• Practical safety judgment around failure modes, validation coverage, and autonomy risk.
• Excellent verbal and written communication, translating technical insight into business impact.
• Comfortable making decisions under uncertainty, prioritizing velocity over perfection.
• Strong advocate for user feedback internally.

Nice to Have

• Experience with autonomous robots or autonomous vehicles.
• Experience with perception/autonomy evaluation frameworks and large-scale field-test data analysis.
• Experience generating or using synthetic/simulation-generated data for perception.
• Experience with data collection operations (teleoperation fleets, annotation/curation pipelines).
• Experience working with customers in light and heavy industrial environments.
• Familiarity with robotics functional safety standards (ISO 10218, ISO/TS 15066, ISO 13482, RIA 15.08).