Founding Research Partnerships Lead

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential robotics organization in their search for a Founding Research Partnerships Lead to establish market presence across US university labs, AI research institutions, and corporate R&D groups. This is a remote, founding go-to-market role where you will own a regional territory end-to-end—from first technical conversation through demonstration, purchase, deployment handoff, and expansion.

This is not a conventional account-executive role, nor a typical developer-relations position. You must be able to discuss researchers' work at a technical level, translate requirements into hardware and software specifications, and guide institutions through evaluation and procurement of an open-source humanoid robot platform.

Responsibilities

• Build and own a territory of university AI and robotics labs, corporate research organizations, and physical-AI startups
• Develop direct relationships with lab directors, principal investigators, research scientists, AI engineers, and corporate R&D leaders
• Run technical discovery around research objectives, existing robotics and ML stacks, data requirements, model-development workflows, training environments, and support needs
• Recommend appropriate platform configurations, accessories, software interfaces, data-collection tools, and deployment strategies
• Transport, set up, operate, and demonstrate robotics platforms at customer labs, conferences, workshops, campus roadshows, and private events
• Convert successful initial deployments into larger lab, department, and multi-site purchases
• Bring requirements and competitive feedback back to product, engineering, manufacturing, and support teams
• Represent the organization credibly across physical-AI, embodied-AI, robotics, and academic-research communities

What We're Looking For

Required qualifications:

• Demonstrated experience producing paid commercial adoption inside AI labs, robotics labs, corporate AI research groups, or comparable technical R&D organizations
• Technical fluency to discuss ROS 2, Linux, Python, networking, and robot software integration
• Understanding of perception, control, manipulation, locomotion, and sensor interfaces
• Knowledge of VLMs, VLAs, world models, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and policy deployment
• Familiarity with teleoperation, demonstration collection, robotics datasets, simulation, and sim-to-real workflows
• Understanding of on-robot or edge inference, latency, compute constraints, and hardware/software tradeoffs
• Comfort working hands-on with physical robots: setting up demonstrations, diagnosing ordinary problems, and escalating engineering issues with useful technical context
• Ability and willingness to travel frequently within assigned US territory
• Technical public-presentation experience

Preferred qualifications:

• Prior engineering or research work in robotics, machine learning, embodied AI, autonomous systems, computer vision, or controls
• Existing relationships with university robotics labs, AI labs, corporate research teams, or physical-AI startups
• Experience selling into the robotics ecosystem: hardware, research infrastructure, AI compute, simulation, data platforms, or developer tools
• Contributions to open-source robotics or ML projects, technical talks, publications, workshops, or tutorials demonstrating research-community credibility

This role probably isn't for you if:

• Your experience is primarily conventional SaaS sales without technical research customers
• You are a strong roboticist but do not enjoy prospecting, qualification conversations, discussing budgets, or creating urgency
• You would rather present software demos than operate and troubleshoot real hardware

How We Work With You

Candidates apply directly through Get A Job.ai. Our talent team will conduct an initial screening to understand your background and ensure alignment with the role requirements. Qualified candidates will be submitted to our client for consideration. Please do not attempt to contact the client organization directly, as all communication should flow through Get A Job.ai to ensure a coordinated and professional process.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process based on experience and qualifications.

Equal Opportunity: Get A Job.ai is committed to inclusive hiring practices. We encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds. If you need accommodation during the application process, please inform your recruiter.