Senior Robot Test Operations Manager

agilityrobotics; Pittsburgh (Allegheny County); On-site; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Agility Robotics seeks a Senior Test Operations Manager to own the validation program’s operational heartbeat. You’ll drive uptime, triage, and test protocols across a fleet of robots, coordinating with hardware and software teams to ensure reliable performance in real-world conditions.

You will design longevity campaigns, run comprehensive validation cycles, and deliver data-driven insights to leadership, with a focus on minimizing downtime and accelerating release readiness.

Qualifications

• 5+ years hands-on experience in test operations, system validation, or field operations for complex electromechanical or robotic systems.
• Experience managing a fleet of hardware-software integrated systems - robots, autonomous vehicles, or comparable platforms.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end robot uptime across the validation fleet - define uptime targets, track actuals, and drive rapid recovery when robots are out of commission.
• Build and maintain a structured fleet management system to ensure robots are always available for the right test at the right time.
• Establish and enforce first-line triage protocols so that every robot issue is diagnosed and routed to the right engineering team with clear Jira tickets.
• Develop and maintain preventative maintenance schedules in partnership with hardware engineering and repair technicians.
• Design, build, and evolve longevity test programs that mirror real customer deployment conditions.
• Run release validation cycles and hold go/no-go authority on test completion.
• Track issues by release label so regressions are visible and historical context is preserved.

Skills

Fleet management

Test operations

Data-driven decisions

Diagnostics tooling

Jira tickets

SW/HW collaboration

Longevity testing

Release validation

Metrics & reporting

Tools

Jira

Telemetry tooling

Diagnostic runbooks

Job description

Agility's commercially deployed humanoids operate alongside teams in warehouses, manufacturing facilities, and distribution centers-tackling physically demanding and repetitive tasks while enabling workers to focus on higher-value work. With industry-leading safety standards and years of proven deployment data, we're pioneering a new era of automation that enhances human potential.

Agility Robotics is at the forefront of developing humanoid robots designed to operate in real-world environments. Our mission is to build robots that seamlessly integrate into human workflows, solving complex challenges in logistics, manufacturing, and beyond. As we scale our manufacturing and deployments, we are building the validation infrastructure that ensures every robot that reaches a customer site is one we can stand behind. The Staff Test Operations Manager role is a critical role in making that happen.

About the Role

As a Senior Test Operations Manager at Agility Robotics, you will own the operational heartbeat of our robot validation program. This is not a role for someone who waits for test plans to arrive - it is for someone who sees an idle robot and immediately asks why it is not running, who finds problems that no one else is looking for, and who treats every test result as data that should improve the product.

About the Work

Fleet Uptime and Test Operations

• Own end-to-end robot uptime across the validation fleet - define uptime targets, track actuals, and drive rapid recovery when robots are out of commission
• Build and maintain a structured fleet management system (scheduling, status tracking, maintenance windows) to ensure robots are always available for the right test at the right time
• Establish and enforce first-line triage protocols so that every robot issue is diagnosed, classified (hardware vs. software vs. environment), and routed to the right engineering team with clear, evidence-backed Jira tickets
• Develop and maintain preventative maintenance schedules in partnership with hardware engineering and repair technicians to reduce unplanned downtime

Longevity and Validation Testing

• Design, build, and continuously evolve longevity test programs - multi-robot, multi-mission, extended-duration test campaigns that mirror real customer deployment conditions, not sanitized lab scenarios
• Move the fleet beyond functional smoke tests toward scenario-based, customer-representative validation: object avoidance in cluttered environments, human co-presence, payload variation, stair and terrain diversity, thermal stress, and extended uptime cycles
• Define test success criteria and acceptance thresholds collaboratively with Systems Engineering.
• Run release validation cycles - execute a comprehensive battery of tests before any major software or hardware release reaches customers, and hold the go/no-go authority on test completion
• Track issues by release label so that regressions are visible, persistent failures are escalated, and the history of what was found when is always available

Reporting and Metrics

• Publish weekly leadership reports covering: robot fleet uptime, tests executed, pass/fail rates by release, open issues by severity, and trends across longevity runs
• Define and own the metrics that matter - intervention rates, mission success rates, MTBI (mean time between interventions), and issue escape rates - and flag when metrics are misleading or need to be retired
• Build dashboards that give engineering and product leadership real-time visibility into validation health and release readiness

Testability and Debuggability Improvement

• Partner with SW engineering to improve log structure, telemetry accessibility, and diagnostic tooling so that any member of the team can triage a robot failure - not just the person who built the logging system
• Champion the creation and maintenance of robot diagnostic runbooks: if-then decision trees that route failures to the right owner with the right supporting evidence
• Provide structured, data-driven input to SW and HW teams on user experience friction - what is operationally hard, what breaks under real-world conditions, what customers will notice before engineers do
• Create and maintain reusable test protocols, onboarding guides, and operational playbooks so that institutional knowledge scales with the team

About You

Experience

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in test operations, system validation, or field operations for complex electromechanical or robotic systems
• Demonstrated experience managing and sustaining a fleet of hardware-software integrated systems - robots, autonomous vehicles, or comparable platforms -