What are the responsibilities and job description for the Member of Technical Staff, Technical Project Manager position at Industrial Next (YC W22)?
About IndustrialNext
We envision a world where no manual labor is required to build anything and everything we want.
A Safe world with abundant creativity.
We're building a rapidly scalable, high-performing robotic system for fully autonomous factories. We deliver across multiple embodiments — bimanual / single-arm stations, wheeled humanoids, and mobile manipulators — on a shared stack. Every task we ship has to hit ≥99% success at human or industrial-automation cycle time.
Physical AI is moving fast. Academia and research-focused startups have shown promising early results, but very few have shipped robots that work at industrial precision, speed, and reliability. We have, and that gap is our work.
We invite highly talented AI and robotics engineers excited to join a hyper-scaling startup. You'll work tirelessly to ship first products to early customers while building the foundation models and robots to reshape global manufacturing.
What we believe
- Real-world deployment beats paper benchmarks. Our bar is what runs at customer cycle time with high success rate and dexterity. Every shift, for months and years.
- Commercialized Data Flywheel is critical for Scalable Foundation Models. We're not waiting until our foundation model is ready. We build and deploy working robots, while also building a data pipeline to feed into our foundation model.
- Hardware iteration speed is a moat. Custom grippers, mobile platforms, and data rigs at production runs of dozens to hundreds. Moving fast from hardware design to deployment is what wins.
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Role: Member of Technical Staff, Technical Project Manager
Why this role matters
Cross-project delivery across our customer programs is the function we currently run out of the CTO seat. As we scale to multiple customer commitments shipping in parallel, we need a technical PM who can hold the whole portfolio in their head, unblock the right thing at the right time, and keep customer commitments and engineering reality in sync.
What you'll do
- Report to the CTO and customers to run customer relationships and commitment management on the technical side.
- Build the planning, status, and risk tooling that scales with the team.
- Track and unblock cross-project delivery across our customer programs.
Required
- Education: BS in engineering, CS, or equivalent — you can read code, specs, and engineering trade-off documents fluently.
- Experience: 3 years as a TPM / Engineering PM at a hardware-shipping company. Track record of customer programs delivered on time despite hardware-iteration messiness.
- Customer-facing: Has owned customer relationships at the technical level — joint planning, milestone management, escalation, recovery.
- Hardware and research-integrated delivery cadence: Understands both hardware and research-to-product cycles, and plans accordingly.
- Engineering background: Shipped robotics software before moving into PM.
- Tooling pragmatism: Builds the lightest planning / status / risk tooling that does the job.
Strongly preferred
- TPM / Engineering PM at a robotics or hardware-shipping startup.
- Has run a multi-customer pilot portfolio in parallel, with on-site time at customer factories.
- Familiarity with manufacturing or factory automation as a customer domain.
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How we work
We are looking for hard, relentless engineers who treat shipping as the only metric.
- In-person, on the hardware. SF, on-site, full-time. Relocation will be supported.
- Insane work ethic. Startups win by fast speed, focused and relentless pushes.
- High ownership, high equity. Small team, meaningful equity. Your contribution is significant.
- Demanding and fast-paced. Tight timing constraints, customer commitments, little slack.
If you've thrived at SpaceX, Tesla, or other fast-moving startups, you'll recognize the energy. If "work-life balance" is your top filter, we are not the right fit.
What we offer
- Competitive base salary meaningful equity in an early-stage, fast-growing company.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Relocation support to SF Bay Area.
- A team you'll learn from every day, working on problems that haven't been solved yet.
Equal opportunity
We are an equal opportunity employer. We hire on merit and welcome candidates from any background.