Staff Product Manager - Applied AI

Staff Product Manager, Applied AI
Location: Mountain View, CA (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 physical AI model 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 physical AI model roadmap: product vision, milestones, and release cycles for the core model stack.
• Drive integration, adaptation, and fine-tuning of foundation models into the robot\'s autonomy stack. Sequence which capabilities graduate into the shipping model, balancing capability velocity against reliability and safety.
• Translate customer use cases into model capability requirements and acceptance criteria.
• Partner with the data collection and evaluation team on benchmarks, real-world evaluation, and the success criteria that gate deployment.
• Own the data strategy that feeds model development: define what to collect and why, target tasks and behaviors, and the quality bar.
• Align data technology and operations teams on collection techniques, tooling, and quality expectations.
• 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

• 10+ years of experience in product management or engineering, including 5+ years leading product managers, with a track record of shipping complex hardware products.
• Strong understanding of modern robot learning techniques, including imitation learning and reinforcement learning.
• Demonstrated experience integrating, adapting, or fine-tuning models.
• Strong familiarity with the constraints of running large neural networks on physical edge devices.
• Strong analytical skills, with experience in performance tracking and data-driven decision-making.
• 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.
• Bachelor\'s degree (or equivalent) in mechanical, electrical, systems, or robotics engineering, or related field; advanced degree or MBA helpful.

Nice to Have

• Experience with autonomous robots or autonomous vehicles.
• Experience using simulation tools to improve user experience.
• Hands-on experience training or fine-tuning foundation models.
• 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).

Compensation: $215,000 - $245,000 base salary