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.

This role can be hybrid (3 days on-site per week at one of our offices in Salem, OR, in Pittsburgh, PA or in Fremont, CA) or fully remote, with up to one week of travel per month.

About The Work

• 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.

Required Qualifications

• 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 humanoid or legged robots.
• Experience with ROS, Gazebo, or similar robot middleware and simulation tools.
• Familiarity with foundation models (e.g., vision-language models) and multimodal perception systems.
• Experience with behavioral cloning, reinforcement learning, or diffusion policies for robot control.
• Published research in top-tier conferences (CVPR, RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS).