Senior Manager, Test Automation & Manufacturing Ops

Frontdoor Defense; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Apptronik is building advanced humanoid robots at scale, and manufacturing test is a critical part of ensuring reliability, quality, and production readiness across all robot subsystems.

We are seeking a Manager, Test Operations to be a hands-on technical leader to drive development, maintainability, and scalable hardware and software integrated solutions used for manufacturing and validation testing of robotic systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, or related field
• 5+ years of experience in leading complex electromechanical system test development for automated manufacturing systems
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management; able to represent the team to senior leadership and customers.
• Proven technical leadership — leading engineers and owning delivery of complex, cross-disciplinary systems.
• Willingness to travel to manufacturing sites, up to 20%

Responsibilities

• Lead the team that deploys manufacturing test software and hardware for PCBAs, actuators, cable harnesses, electromechanical subassemblies, full robot system testing
• Ensure scalable and modular test frameworks across multiple test stations and product lines
• Deliver automated functional tests, hardware validation tools, and diagnostic utilities to the manufacturing floor
• Establish criteria for APIs and interfaces between test software and hardware systems
• Own testing process reliability, maintainability, and deployment consistency across environments
• Champion integration of embedded systems, firmware interfaces, sensors, actuators, motion control, data acquisition hardware
• Define hardware bring-up, debugging, troubleshooting, and communication in manufacturing environments
• Collaborate with test/validation teams to ensure testability and manufacturability in designs
• Drive best practices and process improvements within the test organization
• Maintain test documentation, procedures, and architecture diagrams
• Implement code reviews and software release processes (CI/CD)
• Deliver processes and metrics to support internal and contract manufacturing operations

Skills

Technical leadership

Test automation

Stakeholder management

Team leadership

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor's degree in related field

Tools

Git

Jira

CI/CD

Linux

ROS/ROS2

Job description

Apptronik is building advanced humanoid robots at scale, and manufacturing test is a critical part of ensuring reliability, quality, and production readiness across all robot subsystems.

We are seeking a Manager, Test Operations to be a hands-on technical leader to drive development, maintainability, and scalable hardware and software integrated solutions used for manufacturing and validation testing of robotic systems.