Founding Research Partnerships Lead

Menlo; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Menlo Research is seeking a founding go-to-market leader for Asimov in the US research market. You will own a regional territory from first technical conversation to deployment and expansion, translating researchers' work into robot hardware, software, data needs, and deployment plans.

You will build direct relationships with lab leaders, run technical discovery, and drive initial deployments into multi‑site purchases while feeding feedback to product and engineering teams.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience producing paid commercial adoption inside AI labs, robotics labs, or closely comparable technical R&D organizations.
• Technical fluency to discuss ROS 2, Linux, Python, networking, and robot software integration.
• Comfort working hands-on with physical robots: setting up demonstrations and diagnosing issues.
• Ability and willingness to travel frequently within the US territory.
• Technical public-presentations experience.

Responsibilities

• Build and own a territory of university AI and robotics labs, corporate research organizations, and physical‑AI startups.
• Develop direct relationships with lab directors, principal investigators, research scientists, AI engineers, data teams, and corporate R&D leaders.
• Run technical discovery around each customer's research objectives, existing robotics and ML stack, data requirements, model‑development workflow, training and sim environment.
• Determine whether Asimov is the right platform and recommend configurations, accessories, software interfaces, data tools, services, and deployment plan.
• Transport, set up, operate, and demonstrate Asimov at customer labs, conferences, workshops, campus roadshows, and private events.
• Convert initial deployments into larger lab, department, corporate R&D, and multi‑site purchases.
• Bring requirements and competitive feedback back into Menlo's product, engineering, manufacturing, support, and docs teams.
• Represent Menlo credibly across the physical‑AI, embodied‑AI, robotics, and academic‑research communities and conferences.

Job description

About Menlo
Menlo Research is an Applied R&D lab building Asimov, an open-source humanoid robot platform, and the full software stack that powers it. Our mission is to make humanoid labor economically viable, turning software into physical labor at scale. We build across the full stack: hardware architecture, locomotion, autonomy, simulation, and infrastructure. We move fast, ship to real robots, and open-source everything we can. If you want your work to matter beyond a paper or a demo, this is the place.

The Role
This is a founding go-to-market role for Asimov in the US research market. You will establish Asimov inside leading US university labs, AI research organizations, and corporate R&D groups, owning a regional territory end to end: first technical conversation, demonstration, purchase, deployment handoff, and expansion. It is not a conventional account-executive role, and not a conventional developer-relations role. You should be able to discuss a researcher's work at a technical level, translate that work into robot hardware, software, data, AI model, and support requirements, then lead the institution through evaluation and procurement.

What You’ll Do

• Build and own a territory of university AI and robotics labs, corporate research organizations, and physical‑AI startups.

• Develop direct relationships with lab directors, principal investigators, research scientists, AI engineers, data teams, and corporate R&D leaders.

• Run technical discovery around each customer's research objectives, existing robotics and ML stack, data requirements, model‑development workflow, training/fine‑tuning/sim environment, support needs, and decision process.

• Determine whether Asimov is the right platform, and recommend the right robot configuration, accessories, software interfaces, data‑collection tools, services, and initial deployment.

• Transport, set up, operate, and demonstrate Asimov at customer labs, conferences, workshops, campus roadshows, and private events.

• Convert successful initial deployments into larger lab, department, corporate R&D, and multi‑site purchases.

• Bring requirements and competitive feedback back into Menlo's product, engineering, manufacturing, support, and docs teams.

• Represent Menlo credibly across the physical‑AI, embodied‑AI, robotics, and academic‑research communities and conferences.

What We Look For

• Demonstrated experience producing paid commercial adoption inside AI labs, robotics labs, corporate AI research groups, or closely comparable technical R&D organizations.

• Technical fluency to discuss:

  • ROS 2, Linux, Python, networking, and robot software integration

  • perception, control, manipulation, locomotion, and sensor interfaces

  • VLMs, VLAs, world models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and policy deployment

  • teleoperation, demonstration collection, robotics datasets, simulation, and sim‑to‑real workflows

  • on‑robot or edge inference, latency, compute constraints, and hardware/software tradeoffs

• Comfort working hands‑on with physical robots: setting up demonstrations, diagnosing ordinary problems, and escalating deeper engineering issues with useful technical context.

• Ability and willingness to travel frequently within your assigned US territory.

• Technical public‑presentation experience.

Nice to Have

• Prior engineering or research work in robotics, machine learning, embodied AI, autonomous systems, computer vision, controls, or a related domain.

• Existing relationships with university robotics labs, AI labs, corporate research teams, or physical‑AI startups.

• Experience selling into the robotics ecosystem: hardware, research infrastructure, AI compute, simulation, data platforms, developer tools, or other products used by technical research organizations.

• Contributions to open‑source robotics or ML projects, technical talks, publications, workshops, tutorials, or other evidence of research‑community credibility.

This Role Probably Isn't For You If

• Your experience is primarily conventional SaaS sales without technical research customers.

• You are a strong roboticist but do not enjoy prospecting, asking qualification questions, discussing money, or creating urgency.

• You would rather present software demos than operate and troubleshoot real hardware.

Why Join Menlo
You will be the first person carrying Asimov into the US research market, with the freedom to build the territory the way it should be built. Menlo designs its robot in the open, with the people who build on it, and this role puts you at the center of that: shaping how the next generation of labs and R&D teams adopt an open, modular humanoid platform. If you want to be the technical face of a physical‑AI company inside the rooms where the research actually happens, this is the seat.

A Note on AI

You don't need deep AI expertise for every role, but we do expect everyone at Menlo to be intellectually curious, drawn to tinkering and discovery, and excited to use AI as a real collaborator in their work. For some roles, AI fluency is a core requirement. When that's the case, we'll say so explicitly in the qualifications. People who thrive here don't treat AI as a novelty. They use it to think better, and make their work easier for others to build on.

Equal Opportunity and Accommodations

We hire talented people from a wide range of backgrounds. If you're excited about a role but don't meet every bullet, we still encourage you to apply. Menlo Research is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected characteristic. Menlo provides reasonable accommodations during the application process. If you need one, please let your recruiter know.