Job Description A growing technology company is developing an autonomous laboratory platform that combines robotics, software, and scientific workflows to help research teams run experiments and produce reliable results. The company works at the intersection of AI, physical automation, and advanced materials research, with a focus on improving the speed, reliability, and traceability of laboratory work.
As a Technical Product Manager - Robotics and Automation, you'll own the robotics and autonomy layer of the company's laboratory platform. This includes the workcells, instruments, control software, simulation environment, and perception workflows that turn a software-driven decision into a physical experiment and a trustworthy result.
This is a hands-on product ownership role, not a coordination position. You'll define the capabilities the lab needs, make tradeoffs between throughput, reliability, flexibility, and cost, and guide requirements through design, development, commissioning, and deployment. You'll work closely with robotics, hardware, and software engineers, as well as the scientists who rely on the lab, and spend meaningful time on the lab floor.
This is a full-time, onsite position based in Brooklyn, NY. You'll report to a senior company leader and help shape the product direction for an autonomous laboratory environment where established product-management playbooks may not yet exist.
Required Skills & Experience - 5-7 years of experience in product management or a highly cross-functional engineering role
- At least 2 years of experience with robotics, automation, or integrated hardware and software products
- Experience at a technical or deep-technology company
- Strong technical understanding across automation disciplines such as robotics, controls, mechatronics, and mechanical engineering
- Ability to assess how sensors, actuators, mechanisms, and software work together; challenge assumptions; identify risks; and translate engineering constraints into clear requirements and priorities
- Experience maturing automated or semi-automated processes for production, building reliability test suites, and determining readiness to scale throughput
- Experience taking a physical product from prototype through production while balancing cost, schedule, and reliability
- Experience leading technical discovery with customers or internal stakeholders, challenging incomplete requirements, and identifying operational constraints
- Proven ability to set priorities and build alignment across hardware, software, and science teams without relying on formal authority
- Strong first-principles thinking and comfort creating structure in ambiguous environments
Desired Skills & Experience - Experience with laboratory automation, such as liquid handlers, synthesis and characterization instruments, or lab scheduling software
- Familiarity with robot software stacks, simulation, autonomy, or reinforcement learning systems
- Knowledge of industrial automation and integration standards, such as PLCs and OPC UA
- Experience with safety, regulatory, or quality requirements for hardware in laboratory or industrial settings
- Exposure to enterprise or government customers in deep-technology or regulated industries, including onsite deployments
What You Will Be Doing Daily Responsibilities
- Own the roadmap for laboratory workcells, including the experiments they support and decisions about which instruments and robots to add or build
- Define requirements for new workcells and instrument integrations, from initial customer needs through design review, build, commissioning, and handoff to operations
- Guide hardware lifecycle decisions from prototype through pilot and production readiness, with clear criteria for each stage
- Shape the software that runs the physical laboratory, including scheduling, orchestration, robot and instrument control, sample handling, and error recovery
- Define the appropriate level of autonomy for laboratory systems and when human involvement or approval is required
- Establish standards for calibration, traceability, and data quality as physical measurements are captured and converted into data
- Define and monitor laboratory performance metrics, including throughput, uptime, experiment success rate, time to result, and cost per experiment
- Partner with engineers and operators to address failure modes, diagnostics, monitoring, reliability, and maintainability
- Establish safety and compliance requirements for hazardous materials, high-temperature and high-pressure processes, and interactions between robots and operators
- Work closely with robotics and controls engineering, science, and machine learning research to align the roadmap with technical realities and user needs
- Partner with the Technical Product Manager for Software and Agents to define the interface between the core platform and the physical laboratory
- Collaborate with partner and customer product teams and technical leads on instrument integration, site requirements, and deployment
- Communicate product direction to engineering teams and company leadership
The Offer - Compensation of $170,000-$220,000 per year
- Full-time, onsite work in Brooklyn, NY
- Opportunity to own product direction for an autonomous laboratory platform
- Direct collaboration with robotics, hardware, software, and science teams
- A hands-on role shaping systems from initial requirements through deployment
Applicants must be authorized to work in the US on a full-time basis now and in the future.
