Vice President of Embodied AI

About the role

Apptronik is a human-centered robotics company developing AI-powered robots to support humanity in every facet of life. Our flagship humanoid robot, Apollo, is built to collaborate thoughtfully with people, starting with critical industries such as manufacturing and logistics, with future applications in healthcare, the home, and beyond. We operate at the cutting edge of Applied AI, applying our expertise across the full robotics stack to solve some of society's most important problems. You will join a team dedicated to bringing Apollo to market at scale, tackling the complex challenges like safety, commercialization, and mass production to change the world for the better. Role Overview We are seeking a Vice President of Embodied AI to lead the "brain" and "nervous system" of our humanoid robots. This role owns the company's AI strategy and the core AI and controls organization — real-time controls, whole-body reinforcement learning, dexterous manipulation, VLA post-training, and agentic autonomy — with a primary mandate to unify these stacks into a single, coherent system that performs reliable, useful work for our customers. You will lead a world-class, multi-disciplinary organization of 45+ engineers and researchers. You will own the overarching technical AI strategy and data collection strategy, and serve as a crucial voice in executive discussions on the product and technology roadmap. We are looking for a unique hybrid: a recognized thought leader in the embodied AI research community who possesses the hard-won pragmatism and engineering rigor required to ship physical products to commercial customers. Key Responsibilities AI Strategy & Technical Vision Define and own the company's embodied AI vision and roadmap, aligned with product strategy and long-term autonomy goals. Drive technical decision-making around model architectures and the role of internal models versus strategic partner and third-party foundation and VLA models. Establish architectural principles for how learned and classical components compose into a safe, reliable robotic system. Partner with the CEO, CTO, and executive team to define the product and technology roadmap, translating complex AI capabilities into commercial milestones. Controls Stack Unification Architect and execute a unified controls strategy, bridging high-level semantic reasoning (VLAs and agentic planning), mid-level policy execution (RL), and low-level deterministic real-time control. Define clean interfaces, arbitration, and fallback behavior across the layers of the stack so that capability gains in one layer compound rather than conflict. Ensure the unified stack meets the latency, stability, and safety requirements of dynamic humanoid platforms operating around people. Model Development & Autonomy Lead development of the models and policies that power the robot: state estimation and real-time control, whole-body RL locomotion and coordination, dexterous high-DoF manipulation, VLA post-training and adaptation, and agentic task planning and error recovery. Establish best practices for fine-tuning, distillation and compression, safety constraints and guardrails, and continuous learning. Define the evaluation criteria and benchmarks that tie model performance to real-world robotic outcomes. Guide the adaptation of strategic partner and third-party foundation models into the production stack, prioritizing co-optimization where it drives performance, safety, and speed to deployment. Data Collection & Learning Strategy Own the end-to-end data strategy required to train state-of-the-art embodied AI: what data to collect, from which sources, at what scale, and to what quality bar. Define and drive data collection programs across teleoperation, real-world robot fleets, and synthetic data and simulation. Set dataset requirements, curation standards, and quality metrics for all training and evaluation data. Direct the design of simulation environments and scenarios used for training, evaluation, and sim-to-real transfer. Customer-Centric Deployment Ensure our controllers are reliable, safe, and deliver tangible ROI for customers. Own the definition of model readiness for deployment — the performance, safety, and robustness criteria a model must meet before reaching customer sites. Use field telemetry and deployment feedback to close the loop between real-world behavior, data collection priorities, and model improvement. Thought Leadership & Recruiting Act as an ambassador for the company within the global AI and robotics communities. Publicize key findings where aligned with IP strategy, and build strategic research and industry relationships. Attract, hire, and retain top-tier engineering and research talent. Team & Organizational Leadership Directly manage and scale a multi-disciplinary organization of engineers and researchers across real-time controls, whole-body RL control, dexterous hand control, VLA post-training, and autonomy frameworks. Collaborate with the software, infrastructure, and hardware organizations to ensure the AI stack is well supported from training through on-robot deployment. Set engineering and research standards, review practices, and career development paths. Foster a culture of technical excellence, experimentation, accountability, and cross-functional collaboration. Qualifications Required Experience 10+ years in robotics, AI, or machine learning, with 5+ years in senior leadership (VP/Director) managing large, multi-disciplinary technical organizations (40+ engineers/researchers). Deep technical fluency across the modern robotics stack, including the trade-offs between classical control theory, reinforcement learning, and modern foundation models (VLAs, world action models, LLMs). Capable of taking complex, AI-driven hardware or robotics systems out of R&D and successfully deploying them to external customers in the real world — balancing "perfect" research with "good enough to ship." Experience defining and scaling the data strategy behind large-scale action models: teleoperation, real-world collection, auto-labeling, and sim-to-real transfer. Respected presence in the AI/robotics research community (e.g., publications at ICRA, IROS, CoRL, NeurIPS, CVPR), with a network that supports strategic hiring and partnerships. Exceptional communication: able to distill complex technical constraints into clear strategic decisions for the executive team, while diving deep into architecture discussions with staff engineers. Strongly Preferred Direct experience with humanoid or legged robotics, dexterous manipulation, or dynamic whole-body control. Experience integrating and co-optimizing with strategic partners or third-party foundation and VLA models. Experience navigating the safety and compliance challenges of deploying autonomous robots in human-centric environments. Advanced degree in Robotics, Computer Science, ML, or a related field. What Success Looks Like The controls and AI stacks operate as one unified architecture, from semantic reasoning down to real-time actuation. Robots reliably perform useful, revenue-generating work for customers, with AI capability translating directly into commercial milestones. The data collection strategy measurably accelerates model improvement across teleoperation, fleet, and simulation sources. Internal, partner, and third-party models are adopted pragmatically, based on what delivers performance, safety, and speed to deployment. The organization attracts world-class talent and is recognized as a leader in applied embodied AI, not just research. Executive and product decisions are grounded in a clear-eyed view of what the AI stack can deliver and when. Physical Requirements Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer Must be able to lift 15 pounds at times Vision to read printed materials and a computer screen Hearing and speech to communicate *This is a direct hire. Please, no outside Agency solicitations. Apptronik provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.