About The Role

The Senior Manager of AI Innovation will be a key leader within our cutting-edge humanoid robotics company, bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI/ML research and functional robotic applications. Your mission is to drive research that derisks our product roadmap by solving complex robotics challenges on the one to two year time horizon. This will include driving initiatives from concept stage to minimal viable product across domains such as perceptive real-time planning, whole body-control, and learning from demonstration. You will manage a high-performing team of researchers and engineers, fostering a culture of rigorous experimentation, problem based research, failing fast, and extreme ownership.

About The Work

• Oversee the lifecycle of innovation projects, from initial research and whiteboarding to "proof-of-concept" deployment on humanoid platforms.
• Owns the success of the AI Innovation program, holding themselves and the team accountable for quality and delivery.
• Drive research into novel AI solutions for complex robotics challenges, such as real-time planning, human-robot interaction, and adaptive motor control.
• Accelerate our data flywheel strategy to combine teleoperation, synthetic data, and fleet learning to expand the fleet performance and reliability.
• Partner with Hardware and Robot Software teams to ensure that next-generation sensor suites are optimized for future AI architectures.
• Champion the existing team's talent and represent their needs to senior leadership.
• Manage performance cycles, create individualized development plans, and lead hiring to scale the AI Innovation team.
• Foster a safe and collaborative environment within the team, encouraging open dialogue and the freedom to learn from failed experiments.

Required Qualifications

• Advanced degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Minimum of 8 years of experience in AI/ML, with at least 3 years in a management role.
• Demonstrated experience in developing and deploying real-time AI solutions for robotics, autonomous systems, or other mission-critical applications.
• Strong expertise in core AI domains, including computer vision, reinforcement learning, and large language models (LLMs) applied to robotics.
• Proven track record of managing scaling high-performance engineering or research teams.
• Experience deploying models on resource-constrained edge devices, balancing inference speed, power consumption,