Senior Manager, AI Perception and Skills

About the role

The Senior Manager of AI Perception & Skills will be a key technical leader at Agility Robotics, owning the development of AI-driven perception and skills capabilities for our humanoid robots. You will lead two complementary teams — AI Perception, focused on real-time object detection and scene understanding, and AI Skills, focused on learning from demonstration — driving research and engineering that deliver critical capabilities to production robots. You will build a culture of rigorous experimentation, fast iteration, and extreme ownership. Your focus is applied research and engineering that delivers production impact within a one-year horizon.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end delivery of AI Perception and Skills capabilities, from research conception through production deployment on robot hardware.
• Own the roadmap and success of both teams, setting clear goals and holding yourself and the team accountable for quality, reliability, and pace.
• Accelerate our data flywheel strategy — combining teleoperation, synthetic data, and fleet learning — to systematically expand robot performance and reliability at scale.
• Champion your team's talent, represent their needs to senior leadership, and foster an inclusive environment where engineers feel safe to experiment and learn from failure.
• Drive performance cycles, build individualized development plans, and lead hiring to grow both teams with high-caliber researchers and engineers.

Requirements

• Advanced degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience in AI/ML, with 3+ years managing engineering or research teams.
• Demonstrated experience shipping real-time AI systems in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or other mission-critical domains.
• Deep technical expertise in computer vision and learning-from-demonstration (e.g., imitation learning, behavior cloning).
• Experience deploying models on resource-constrained edge hardware, with practical knowledge of inference optimization, power, and thermal constraints.
• Proven ability to build and scale high-performing teams, including hiring, mentorship, and organizational development.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with teleoperation systems for robot data collection or remote operation.
• Experience with humanoid or legged robot platforms in research or production settings.
• Experience fine-tuning or adapting foundation models (vision-language, diffusion policy, etc.) for robotics applications.

Benefits

• Base Salary Range: $222,000—$347,000 USD
• 401(k) Plan: Includes a 6% company match
• Equity: Company stock options
• Insurance Coverage: 100% company-paid medical, dental, vision, and short/long-term disability insurance for employees
• Benefit Start Date: Eligible for benefits on your first day of employment
• Well-Being Support: Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Time Off: Flexible, unlimited PTO (exempt) or 10 vacation days (non-exempt), plus 12 company holidays including winter shutdown
• On-Site Perks: Catered lunches four times a week and healthy snacks at Salem and Pittsburgh locations
• Parental Leave: Generous paid parental leave programs
• Relocation Assistance: Provided for eligible roles
• Annual Discretionary Bonus: Provided for eligible roles