Senior Product Manager, Perception and Navigation

The role

You will drive the product vision and execute roadmaps across the hardware and software divide. You will own the perception and navigation software roadmap, including detection, tracking, localization, mapping, and obstacle avoidance.

What you will do

• Own and maintain the perception and navigation software roadmap.
• Drive the technical definition of the perception stack.
• Define evaluation metrics and field-testing regimes for perception and navigation.
• Own the requirements for perception data pipelines.
• Lead product requirements for safe perception.
• Co-design within the compute envelope.
• Define and prioritize use cases based on business impact, feasibility, and customer needs.
• Ensure product development efforts align with real-world economic value.
• Synthesize insights from user research, customer meetings, usage data, and sales feedback.
• Work with industrial design, user experience, and engineering teams to implement interactive features.

Required qualifications

• At least 7 years of experience product management
• Strong experience in perception and navigation fundamentals: detection, tracking, localization, mapping, and obstacle avoidance
• Demonstrated experience defining evaluation metrics, field-testing regimes, and performance tracking for autonomy or perception software
• Field deployment experience taking perception or autonomy software from the lab into reliable real-world operation
• Practical safety judgment around failure modes, validation coverage, and autonomy risks
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written
• Ability to make decisions in uncertainty, prioritizing velocity over perfection
• Ability to prioritize user feedback
• 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

Nice to have

• Experience with autonomous robots or autonomous vehicles
• Experience with perception or autonomy evaluation frameworks and large-scale field-test data analysis
• Experience generating or using synthetic and simulation-generated data for perception
• Experience with data collection operations (teleoperation fleets, annotation and curation pipelines)
• Experience working with customers in light and heavy duty industrial environments
• Experience with robotics and functional safety standards (ISO 10218, ISO/TS 15066, ISO 13482, RIA 15.08)

About the company

Apptronik is a human-centered robotics company developing AI-powered robots to support humanity in every facet of life. Their flagship humanoid robot, Apollo, is built to collaborate with people in industries such as manufacturing and logistics.