Vice President of Embodied AI

Apptronik
Austin
Full timeFunction: Executive & General ManagementSkills: ["Communication","Technical leadership","Strategic thinking","Cross-functional collaboration","Accountability"]

Lead the embodied AI “brain” and “nervous system” for humanoid robots, owning AI strategy, technical vision, and the unified controls and autonomy architecture. Drive development across state estimation, whole-body reinforcement learning, dexterous manipulation, VLA post-training, and agentic planning. Own the end-to-end data strategy (teleoperation, fleets, simulation) and define deployment readiness for safe, reliable, revenue-generating customer outcomes while scaling a 45+ person multidisciplinary team.

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FursaFursa
Apptronik
Apptronik
14 hours ago

Vice President of Embodied AI

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Job Summary

Lead the embodied AI “brain” and “nervous system” for humanoid robots, owning AI strategy, technical vision, and the unified controls and autonomy architecture. Drive development across state estimation, whole-body reinforcement learning, dexterous manipulation, VLA post-training, and agentic planning. Own the end-to-end data strategy (teleoperation, fleets, simulation) and define deployment readiness for safe, reliable, revenue-generating customer outcomes while scaling a 45+ person multidisciplinary team.
Location: Austin
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Executive & General Management
Seniority: Sr. Director level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Own the company’s embodied AI vision and roadmap, aligning AI strategy with product strategy and autonomy goals.
  • •Architect and unify the controls strategy across semantic reasoning (VLAs and agentic planning), RL policy execution, and deterministic real-time control with robust interfaces and fallback behavior.
  • •Lead model and policy development for state estimation, locomotion and coordination, dexterous manipulation, VLA adaptation, and agentic error recovery.
  • •Own the end-to-end data collection and learning strategy across teleoperation, real-world fleet data, and synthetic/simulation sources, including dataset quality and evaluation benchmarks.
  • •Direct and scale a 45+ person multidisciplinary organization, setting engineering and research standards and defining deployment readiness for reliable, safe customer outcomes.

Key Requirements

  • •10+ years in robotics, AI, or machine learning, with 5+ years in senior leadership (VP/Director) managing 40+ engineers/researchers.
  • •Deep technical fluency across the modern robotics stack, including classical control theory, reinforcement learning, and foundation-model approaches (VLAs, world action models, LLMs).
  • •Proven ability to deploy complex R&D robotics/AI systems to external customers in real-world conditions.
  • •Experience defining and scaling data strategy for large-scale action models, including teleoperation, real-world collection, auto-labeling, and sim-to-real transfer.
  • •Respected presence in AI/robotics research communities and exceptional communication for executive strategy and deep architecture discussions.
Experience:RoboticsMachine learningAIFoundation modelsReinforcement learningHumanoid robotics
Skills:CommunicationTechnical leadershipStrategic thinkingCross-functional collaborationAccountability
Tech Stack:Embodied AIRobotic controlsWhole-body reinforcement learningReinforcement learningState estimationReal-time controlDexterous manipulationVLAVLA post-trainingAgentic autonomyAgentic task planningTeleoperationSimulationSim-to-real transferFoundation modelsWorld action modelsLLMsFine-tuningDistillationModel compression

Company Brief

Apptronik
Develops advanced general-purpose robots and robotic limbs for industrial and commercial applications, combining hardware, actuators, and control software to enable versatile, human-scale robot solutions.
Industry: Robotics
Company Size: Medium (51 to 250 employees)
Growth: Growth Stage Startup
Funding: Series A
Headquarters: Austin, United States
Founded: 2018
WebsiteLinkedIn