Chief Operating Officer (COO)

Formulate Labs; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Formulate Robotics is seeking a Chief Operating Officer to guide the company through a pivotal growth phase. You will own operations outside core engineering, including fundraising, finance, go-to-market, recruiting, and partnerships.

The role requires building scalable processes, managing investor relations, and leading strategic execution across manufacturing, platform deployment, and commercial efforts as the company moves toward Series A and beyond.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in startups or demanding environments with leadership experience.
• Experience in venture fundraising and investor relations.
• Strong financial and analytical abilities including budgets and KPIs.

Responsibilities

• Translate company priorities into concrete plans with owners, timelines, and results.
• Own cross-functional problems and build organizational infrastructure for growth.
• Lead fundraising, finance, strategy, and investor communications for Series A readiness.
• Develop operating plans, budgets, forecasts, KPIs, and company-wide reporting.
• Build commercial motion, pricing, proposals, and sales processes; lead deployment at scale.
• Coordinate operations across manufacturing, robotics, finance, recruiting, and functions; establish rhythms and metrics.

Skills

Leadership

Strategic planning

Fundraising

Financial modeling

Operations management

Go-to-market

Team building

Investor relations

Job description

About The Role

We're looking for a Chief Operating Officer to help lead Formulate Robotics through its next stage of growth.

About The Role

We're looking for a Chief Operating Officer to help lead Formulate Robotics through its next stage of growth.

We're a seed-funded AI and robotics company entering a pivotal period. Over the coming months, we'll be deploying our platform, expanding our commercial efforts, growing the team, and preparing the company for its next stage of financing and scale.

This is a broad, high-ownership operating role spanning nearly everything outside of core engineering: fundraising, finance, company operations, go-to-market, commercial strategy, recruiting, organizational development, and strategic partnerships.

We want someone unusually ambitious, resourceful, and comfortable with ambiguity. Someone who can move between a financial model, an investor conversation, a major robotics customer opportunity, and an internal operating problem without missing a beat.

What You'll Do

Company Strategy & Execution

• Help translate company priorities into concrete plans, owners, timelines, and results.
• Take ownership of important cross-functional problems that don't cleanly belong to any one department.
• Help build the organizational infrastructure required to move from seed stage through Series A and beyond.
• Work with the Founder/CEO and leadership team on major strategic and operating decisions.

Fundraising, Finance & Strategy

• Play a central role in Series A preparation, fundraising strategy, investor materials, financial models, diligence, and investor relationships.
• Develop operating plans, budgets, forecasts, KPIs, and company-level reporting.
• Develop a deep understanding of the economics of both our manufacturing business and our technology platform.
• Help evaluate major strategic decisions around capital allocation, hiring, commercialization, partnerships, and expansion.

Commercial & Go-to-Market

• Help build the commercial motion for Formulate Robotics as we begin deploying our platform to external customers.
• Work across platform sales, strategic accounts, partnerships, customer deployments, and commercial operations.
• Help develop pricing, proposals, sales processes, pipeline management, and customer success infrastructure.
• Build and lead the teams and operating systems required to commercialize and deploy our technology at scale.

Company Operations

• Coordinate operations across our manufacturing business, robotics platform, commercial organization, finance, recruiting, and other company functions.
• Establish operating rhythms, metrics, systems, and processes that allow a rapidly growing organization to move quickly without becoming chaotic.
• Identify bottlenecks early and step in directly when necessary to solve them.
• Help ensure the company stays focused and executes against its most important priorities.

Build the Company

• Recruit, organize, and scale the company through its next several stages.
• Build teams and functions that today may consist of only one person, a contractor, or an early-stage process.
• Help create the culture, operating cadence, and standards of a highly ambitious technology company.
• Be willing to do unglamorous work when that's what the company needs.

What We're Looking For

• Low ego, high standards, and the ambition to build something great
• 7+ years of experience, with meaningful time in startups, technology, investing, operations, or similarly demanding environments.
• Previously founded or helped build an early-stage company, ideally through a meaningful period of growth.
• Experience participating directly in venture fundraising, whether as a founder, operator, investor, or senior member of an early-stage team.
• Strong financial and analytical ability, including comfort with financial models, operating plans, unit economics, budgets, and board-level metrics.
• Experience building teams and operating systems in organizations that were changing quickly.
• Strong commercial instincts and the ability to engage credibly with customers, investors, partners, and employees.
• A genuine fascination with AI and a strong conviction that AI and robotics will fundamentally reshape the physical economy.
• Extremely high agency.
• The ability to move fluidly between strategy and execution.

Experience in robotics, industrial technology, manufacturing, chemicals, or hardware is valuable, but not required. We would rather hire an exceptional startup builder who can learn the industry than a traditional manufacturing executive who isn't comfortable operating at startup speed.

The Person We're Looking For

You probably think more like a founder than a traditional professional executive.

You want meaningful ownership in what you're building and are excited by the prospect of joining a funded company at an inflection point, before the organization, processes, and answers have all been figured out.

You're comfortable walking into an ambiguous situation, figuring out what matters, and making things happen.

You're intellectually curious enough to understand manufacturing economics, robotics, AI, fundraising, enterprise sales, and organizational design without needing to be the world's foremost expert in any one of them.

And you're looking for something you can spend years building, not simply your next operating role.

Why This Is Different

• Join a seed-funded AI and robotics company at a major inflection point, ahead of platform deployments, broader commercialization, and our next stage of financing.
• Work at the intersection of AI, robotics, manufacturing, and the physical economy.
• Help take technology developed and proven inside a real operating factory and deploy it into the broader market.
• Have meaningful influence across fundraising, commercial strategy, company operations, and organizational development.
• Build functions, teams, and operating systems from the ground up.
• Take on increasing scope and leadership as Formulate Robotics scales.
• Equity and the opportunity to participate directly in the value you help create.

This is a full-time, in-person role based in Mountain View, CA.