Senior Product Manager, Perception and Navigation

The Robot Age; Sunnyvale (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Apptronik in Sunnyvale, CA is seeking a senior product manager to own the perception and navigation roadmap for Apollo. You will translate sensing and localization needs into clear product priorities and release criteria, guiding autonomy-focused decisions across teams.

The role sits at the intersection of robotics, AI, and hardware, driving measurable outcomes in field validation and safety while collaborating with sensing, compute, and go-to-market groups.

Qualifications

• Experience in product management for robotics, autonomy, AI, or hardware-software systems.
• Ability to reason about robot safety, field validation, and release gates.
• Translating autonomy constraints into customer-facing tradeoffs.
• Cross-functional leadership with engineering, data, operations, and commercial teams.

Responsibilities

• Set feature priorities for perception, localization, mapping, tracking, and obstacle avoidance.
• Define field-test and evaluation metrics for robot perception and navigation releases.
• Turn customer and deployment needs into product requirements for autonomy teams.
• Partner across sensing, compute, AI, hardware, and go-to-market teams.

Skills

Robotics PM

Autonomy systems

Cross-functional leadership

Safety-focused

Job description

What the role actually is

Apptronik is hiring a senior product manager in Sunnyvale for the perception and navigation layer of Apollo. The role translates robot sensing, scene understanding, localization, mapping, and obstacle-avoidance needs into product priorities and release criteria.

This is a product seat close to autonomy: it owns the roadmap, evaluation metrics, data pipeline requirements, and cross-functional tradeoffs that decide how a humanoid perceives and moves through customer environments.

What you would work on

• Set feature priorities for perception, localization, mapping, tracking, and obstacle avoidance
• Define field-test and evaluation metrics for robot perception and navigation releases
• Turn customer and deployment needs into product requirements for autonomy teams
• Partner across sensing, compute, AI, hardware, and go-to-market teams

What they are asking for

• Product management experience with robotics, autonomy, AI, or complex hardware-software systems
• Ability to reason about robot safety, field validation, and release gates
• Comfort translating technical autonomy constraints into customer-facing product tradeoffs
• Cross-functional leadership with engineering, data, operations, and commercial teams

Why this one is worth a look

Humanoid roadmaps can get abstract quickly, but perception and navigation are where useful behavior becomes concrete. This role is interesting because it sits between market promises and the measurable reality of what Apollo can safely perceive, decide, and do.