Product Manager

Noble Machines, Inc; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical, dental and vision coverage

Paid time off and other perks

Job summary

Noble Machines, Inc. seeks a hands-on Product Lead to define and drive the roadmap for Moby's capabilities and deployment tooling. You will partner with AI, software and hardware teams, and ensure field feedback translates into actionable requirements and metrics.

You will visit customer sites, set clear specs, and shape the deployment path from site assessment to handoff. The role requires onsite work in Sunnyvale and travel to industrial sites.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in product management, or a mix of product and engineering, with direct ownership of a technical hardware/software product.
• Enough technical depth to hold your own with robotics, AI and hardware engineers, and to push back when a spec or estimate doesn't add up.
• A track record of writing product requirements, acceptance criteria and validation plans that teams act on.
• Experience defining product metrics and operational workflows for complex physical systems.
• Experience gathering requirements directly from customers or field teams and turning messy input into clear priorities.
• Comfort serving two groups at once, internal engineers and external customers, and making the trade‑offs between them explicit.
• Willingness to work onsite in Sunnyvale and travel to customer sites, including active industrial environments.
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Robotics or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the roadmap for robot capabilities and deployment tooling, from scoping and sequencing through release, and hold the sequence when priorities conflict.
• Turn field reality into requirements. Visit customer sites, observe operators and supervisors, and translate site conditions and edge cases into clear requirements and measurable performance targets.
• Write specs engineers build against without back-and-forth: product requirements, acceptance criteria and validation plans for new skills, autonomy features and operator interfaces.
• Work across AI, software and hardware. Make trade-offs between what the robot learns, what the hardware can support and what the customer needs on site.
• Build the deployment path. Define how a customer evaluates, pilots and rolls out a robot, from site assessment and setup through acceptance testing and handoff, and the internal tools that make it repeatable.
• Partner with field operations on onboarding, operator training and site documentation, so adoption doesn't depend on any one person.
• Define and track success metrics such as task success rate, interventions per hour, uptime, MTBF/MTTR and time from arrival to productive work, and use them to set priorities.
• Represent the product with customers and prospects during evaluations, and feed what you hear back into the roadmap.

Skills

Product management

Technical depth

Requirements writing

Metrics & workflows

Customer requirements gathering

Onsite work

Education

CS/Engineering/Robotics degree or equivalent

Job description

About Noble Machines

Noble Machines builds general-purpose robots that take on the most dangerous and physically demanding jobs in heavy industry, so that doing that work becomes a choice, not a necessity. Our robots work in construction, mining and energy, where dust, heat, uneven ground and the unexpected are normal conditions, not edge cases.

We were founded in 2024 by engineers from Apple, SpaceX, NASA and Caltech. We came out of stealth in March 2026, after shipping robots to a Fortune Global 500 customer within 18 months of starting. We're a Series A team in Sunnyvale, and we're building the next generation of Moby, our general-purpose robot, now.

About the role

You'll be the product lead for what Moby can do and how it gets deployed. On one side, you'll work with our AI, software and hardware engineers to decide which skills and capabilities we build next, and how we test and validate them. On the other, you'll work with customers and our field team to make sure a robot arrives on a jobsite, gets set up quickly and does real work from week one.

This is a hands-on role on a small team. You'll set the roadmap and write the specs. You'll spend time on customer sites watching how work actually gets done, and bring what you learn back into requirements engineers can build against. You'll report to our CEO and work daily with engineering, field operations and the commercial team.

This role is a fit if you like being the person who connects a robot's lab performance to what happens on a muddy site at 6 a.m.

What you'll do

• Own the roadmap for robot capabilities and deployment tooling, from scoping and sequencing through release, and hold the sequence when priorities conflict.
• Turn field reality into requirements. Visit customer sites, observe operators and supervisors, and translate site conditions and edge cases into clear requirements and measurable performance targets (for example, task success rate, cycle time, payload and terrain limits).
• Write specs engineers build against without back-and-forth: product requirements, acceptance criteria and validation plans for new skills, autonomy features and operator interfaces.
• Work across AI, software and hardware. Make trade-offs between what the robot learns, what the hardware can support and what the customer needs on site.
• Build the deployment path. Define how a customer evaluates, pilots and rolls out a robot, from site assessment and setup through acceptance testing and handoff, and the internal tools that make it repeatable.
• Partner with field operations on onboarding, operator training and site documentation, so adoption doesn't depend on any one person.
• Define and track success metrics such as task success rate, interventions per hour, uptime, MTBF/MTTR and time from arrival to productive work, and use them to set priorities.
• Represent the product with customers and prospects during evaluations, and feed what you hear back into the roadmap.

What success looks like in your first six months

• A written roadmap that engineering and leadership agree on, with sequenced milestones and explicit dependencies.
• Engineering teams building and releasing against your specs, with agreed validation criteria for each release.
• A field requirements guide that captures real site conditions, constraints and the edge cases that matter most.
• At least one customer pilot or site deployment run on the onboarding and acceptance process you defined.
• A small set of core metrics (task success, interventions, uptime, time-to-deploy) measured regularly and driving roadmap decisions.

What you'll need

• 5+ years in product management, or a mix of product and engineering, with direct ownership of a technical hardware/software product.
• Enough technical depth to hold your own with robotics, AI and hardware engineers, and to push back when a spec or estimate doesn't add up.
• A track record of writing product requirements, acceptance criteria and validation plans that teams act on.
• Experience defining product metrics and operational workflows for complex physical systems.
• Experience gathering requirements directly from customers or field teams and turning messy input into clear priorities.
• Comfort serving two groups at once, internal engineers and external customers, and making the trade‑offs between them explicit.
• Willingness to work onsite in Sunnyvale and travel to customer sites, including active industrial environments.
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Robotics or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience at an early‑stage robotics, autonomous vehicle, hardware or industrial automation company.
• Product experience with robot learning, autonomy, teleoperation, simulation or testing platforms.
• Background in field testing, customer deployments or fleet operations for complex systems.
• Knowledge of functional safety and robotics standards (ISO 10218, ISO/TS 15066, ANSI/A3 R15.06).
• Familiarity with construction, mining or energy work environments.

Compensation and benefits

The expected base salary for this role in Sunnyvale, CA is $180,000 - $210,000 per year, in line with California's pay transparency law (SB 1162). Where you land in the range depends on your experience, technical depth and skills. Base pay is one part of total compensation, which also includes:

• Equity
• Medical, dental and vision coverage
• Paid time off and other perks

Equal opportunity

Noble Machines is an equal opportunity employer. We make employment decisions based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, disability status or any other status protected by federal, state or local law. We welcome applicants who need accommodations during the hiring process and will work with you to provide them.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential file.

As set forth in Noble Machines, Inc’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service‑connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three‑year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.