Product Manager, Perception & Navigation — Autonomous Robotics

Front Door Defense; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Apptronik is seeking a Product Manager for Perception and Navigation in Austin, TX. You will own the product vision across perception, localization, mapping, and obstacle avoidance, coordinating with engineering, robotics, and field teams to drive safe, scalable deployment of Apollo‑class robots.

You will translate market needs into executable roadmaps, define success metrics, and ensure alignment with business value while guiding the team through complex hardware/software integration and

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in product management, preferably in robotics or AI-enabled hardware.
• Experience defining evaluation metrics, field-testing regimes, and performance tracking for autonomy software.
• Field deployment experience taking perception/autonomy software from lab to real-world operation.
• Practical safety judgment around failure modes, validation coverage, and autonomy risks.
• Excellent written and verbal communication translating technical insights into business impact.

Responsibilities

• Own the perception and navigation software roadmap: scope, sequencing, and feature priorities across detection, tracking, localization, mapping, and obstacle avoidance.
• Define evaluation metrics and field-testing regimes for perception and navigation with latency budgets and release criteria.
• Own data pipelines requirements including collection, labeling, and feedback from field deployments.
• Lead product requirements for safe perception, validating coverage and autonomy risks.
• Collaborate with hardware, sensing, and compute teams to balance edge deployment constraints with performance.

Skills

Perception software

Localization & mapping

Obstacle avoidance

Field deployment experience

Autonomy evaluation

Safety risk judgment

Strong communication

Decision making under uncertainty

Education

Experience with autonomous robots or autonomous vehicles

Perception or autonomy evaluation frameworks

Synthetic/simulation data for perception

Data collection operations (teleoperation fleets, annotation pipelines)

Robotics safety standards knowledge (ISO 10218…ISO 13482)

Job description

Apptronik is seeking a Product Manager for Perception and Navigation in Austin, TX. You will own the product vision across perception, localization, mapping, and obstacle avoidance, coordinating with engineering, robotics, and field teams to drive safe, scalable deployment of Apollo‑class robots.

You will translate market needs into executable roadmaps, define success metrics, and ensure alignment with business value while guiding the team through complex hardware/software integration and