Senior Product Manager

Picklerobot; Lake Charles (LA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Picklerobot is seeking a Senior Product Manager to lead the Autonomy Platform development. This role involves defining roadmaps and productizing the autonomy stack to support innovation in robotics.

The ideal candidate has over 5 years of product management experience, especially in ML or robotics, and excels in working with engineering teams. You'll collaborate closely with our internal customers and be expected to spend time in real-world environments observing product utilization.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of product management experience, at least 2 years with core ML or robotics.
• Understand hardware+software product dynamics.
• Fluent in autonomy and ML engineering discussions.
• Experience shipping internal platforms or developer tools.
• Strong writing skills for PRDs and release notes.

Responsibilities

• Own the Autonomy Platform roadmap.
• Productize the autonomy stack.
• Treat simulation as a product.
• Define criteria for 'good enough to ship'.
• Spend time at customer docks for insights.

Skills

Product management experience

Understanding of ML and robotics

Platform PM instincts

Strong writing skills

Ability to simplify

Comfortable with creative conflict

Job description

Pickle Robot is hiring a Senior Product Manager to own our Autonomy Platform — the perception, planning, and motion stack that powers every Pickle robot on every loading dock today, and that we're building into the foundation for truck loading and an industry autonomy platform for tomorrow.

You’ll be the PM for the brain of the robot. Your internal customers are the autonomy, perception, controls, and ML engineering teams. Your external customers are 3PLs, parcel carriers, and retailers who don’t care how we did it — they care that the robot unloads their trailers reliably and safely, dock hour after dock hour.

In this platform-focused capacity, your approach to reliability per dock-hour, simulation depth, development speed, and machine-learning failure scenarios will mirror the way traditional PMs evaluate user-facing features. You will be responsible for crafting actionable PRDs that serve as technical blueprints for engineering teams while rigorously upholding performance standards, specifically pick speeds, intervention rates, and recovery times.

• Own the Autonomy Platform roadmap. From perception and grasp planning through motion control and exception handling — define what we build, what we don’t, and in what order. Partner with engineering leadership to make tradeoffs between current customer reliability and future capability.

• Productize the autonomy stack. Pickle’s autonomy isn't just code that runs the robot — it's the platform we believe will power our own truck-loading product and, in the longer term, serve as an autonomy layer for the broader industry. You’ll help shape what that productization looks like.

• Treat simulation as a product. SIM is how we ship safely. Define how the simulation environment evolves to support faster iteration, broader scenario coverage, and pre-deployment validation that actually predicts field behavior.

• Reason about probabilistic systems. Every ML model in our stack has a failure mode. You’ll define what "good enough to ship" looks like — failure modes, fallbacks, human-in-the-loop thresholds, intervention rates — and you’ll defend those criteria against demo-driven optimism.

• Get out of the office. Pickle PMs go where things happen. You’ll spend time at customer docks, with operators, watching real trailers get unloaded and real edge cases get caught.

• 5+ years of product management experience, with at least 2 years shipping products where ML, robotics, or other probabilistic systems were core to value — not adjacent to it.

• Comfortable with a hardware+software product. You understand that hardware iterations are slow and expensive, software iterations are fast, and ML behavior is neither, and you scope accordingly.

• Fluent with autonomy and ML engineering teams. You don’t need to implement gradient descent yourself, but you can have a real conversation about perception failure modes, planning constraints, and model evaluation.

• Platform PM instincts. You’ve shipped internal platforms, SDKs, simulation environments, or developer tools — and you measure success in downstream team velocity and reliability, not feature count.

• Strong writer. PRDs, one-pagers, MRDs, release notes. We write things down at Pickle.

• Bias to action and to simplification. You ship; you don’t over-architect; you push back when scope creeps.

• Comfortable with creative conflict. You disagree well, assume positive intent, and stay focused on the idea.

• Bonus: prior experience in robotics, logistics, supply chain, simulation tooling, or AV stacks.

Location & Travel

• Based at our Charlestown, MA headquarters, in-office at least 3 days per week.

• Approximately 25% travel