Technical Lead Manager - Production Engineering

Location: Onsite - Austin, TX

Department: Software Engineering

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