Location: Chicago, IL Headquarters
Type: Full-time, in office
Company Stage: Early-stage / startup
This role is a full-time opportunity to make a meaningful impact as we continue building and scaling our business. We believe this position offers strong ownership, growth potential, and the chance to contribute directly to Autopilot's next phase of growth.
About Us — Our Mission & Vision
At Autopilot, our mission is to free people up to do what they do best by automating everything else. We are building the infrastructure layer that powers autonomy in motion across the physical world — including sports, fitness, logistics, healthcare, and more. Our systems help robots move, record, deliver, train, and connect in real-world environments that have historically lacked modern tooling. Our values are simple and non-negotiable: Do Good. Have Fun. Make Money. We believe these are mutually reinforcing, and we work hard to uphold them as we grow.
We move fast, operate scrappy, and care deeply about building something that works. Our HQ is a large, active space that needs structure, ownership, and someone who can make it run like a machine.
Benefits
You will be eligible to participate in company benefits and perks, which currently include:
- Base Salary + Annual bonus potential
- The total compensation range for this role is $100,000–$200,000. This range reflects total target compensation, which includes base salary and bonus potential. Where a candidate falls within the range depends on factors such as experience and skills.
- Equity: Early-stage ownership through stock options. A chance to build meaningful value as we scale.
- 100% Employer-covered Health, Dental, and Vision Insurance
- 401(k) — Company-administered plan
- Flexible PTO — Time off as needed, coordinated with your team
- Travel Reimbursement — Reimbursed in accordance with company policy, where role-related travel is required
- Team & Culture Events — Team offsites, social events, and company-sponsored activities
Benefits and policies may be updated from time to time at the company's discretion.
The Role
We sell an outcome, not a robot. Customers buy a guarantee that the work gets done, and they buy it as a subscription.
Being OEM-agnostic is our strategic advantage and our hardest operational problem. We are not protected by owning the hardware. We are protected by being the only company that can select the right robot for a job, prove it works before a customer sees it, keep it running at a cost that holds margin, and repeat that in a market we entered last quarter.
Nobody owns that today. It is spread across the founder, engineering, and whoever is closest to the problem that week. That is the single biggest constraint on how fast we can grow.
This role consolidates it. You will decide which hardware partners we bet on, set the quality bar that protects the guarantee we sell, turn our service program into something that scales without linear headcount, and bring the field evidence that tells engineering what to build next. What you own determines our gross margin and the pace at which we can enter new markets.
What You'll Do
- Partner, platform, and embedded systems portfolio strategy. Own the OEM and distribution relationships and the decisions behind them. Evaluate hardware against real customer jobs, run structured pilots, and make the call on what we adopt, what we deprecate, and what we skip. Hold partners accountable on defects, firmware, and escalation, across time zones. Concentration in any single OEM is a risk you manage deliberately, not one we discover. Guide build/partner/buy decisions as we build the universal platform that guarantees reliable autonomous outcomes for customers
- Quality as a commercial guarantee. Own internal QA and strategic planning for partner hardware and our embedded systems. Build the acceptance criteria, regression testing, and pre-deployment validation that nothing goes live without clearing. What we are willing to promise in a contract should be a function of what your testing proves, not what we hope.
- Uptime automation. Own the software suite that maximizes uptime and removes friction from the field: health monitoring, alerting, remote intervention, and the tooling our team lives in. Every recurring manual workaround is a requirement you have not written yet. Track human touches per robot and drive the number toward zero.
- Productize Robot Operations (Concierge Program) and Autopilot Academy. Stabilize the Concierge Program, then productize it. Decompose the work into a defined service catalog, decide what gets automated and what gets deskilled, and package and price what remains. Run the Academy as the mechanism that scales it: training, certification, and enablement so our field team, our customers, and our channel partners can all deliver to the same standard. The goal is coverage that grows with the fleet without our headcount growing with it.
- Autonomous Vision and R&D expansion roadmapping. Accelerate the roadmap by bringing what only the field knows. Partner with engineering to guide embedded systems, autonomous navigation, vision-based perception, Skills Store roadmapping. Support market evaluation, discovery, scoping, and enablement as we enter new verticals and enterprise accounts, including security review, safety, compliance, and site constraints. Get us ready to deliver safe, trusted, reliable outcomes before we sign, not after.
- Field Operations. Lead and grow the field operations team. Own coverage, escalation, and the standard for how we show up on a customer site.
Who You Are
- 5-10+ years across robotics or hardware operations, field engineering, technical program management, or technical product. We care that you have done both the operating side and the building side.
- You have run QA or validation on physical systems where a miss reached a customer.
- You have managed vendor or OEM relationships and gotten results out of a partner who does not report to you.
- You have led a team and you want to lead one again.
- Fluent enough in the embedded stack to hold your own with the people who write firmware: telemetry, OTA, provisioning, intermittent connectivity.
- You think in systems and unit economics. You can tell the difference between a problem worth automating and one worth absorbing.
- You reach for data before anecdotes, and you write things down. SOPs, acceptance criteria, and postmortems are how you work.
- Comfortable in front of a facilities director and an OEM engineering team in the same afternoon. Reliable transportation.
Helpful, not required: indoor/outdoor autonomous systems, security, inspection, facilities management, or asset management operations; training and certification program design; working with overseas hardware OEMs; product management, regulated environments and their compliance frameworks.