Technical Lead Manager - Production Engineering at Apptronik
Onsite - Austin, TX
—
Jul 29, 2026
Onsite - Austin, TX
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This is a people-management role leading a newly formed Production Engineering team at a humanoid robotics company. The manager will own the engineering "last mile" — integrating subsystems into field-ready robots, commissioning them under Factory Acceptance Tests at customer sites, and establishing fleet deployment, observability, and reliability practices. The role suits an experienced technical leader with hands-on hardware/software integration background who is ready to build a cross-disciplinary team from the ground up.
Senior level · 8+ years · Austin, TX · Full-time
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 30 people in the Austin, TX area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (computer and information systems managers). range 20–45
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $180,882 (middle half $145,991–$225,298).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 1, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (8)
The title is simply 'Manager' with no seniority modifier; advertised seniority is treated as Unspecified. However, the scope (building a new org, owning external deployments, reporting to a head-of-org) and the 8+ years experience gate support a Senior classification.
SOC classification is a genuine judgment call: the role has formal direct-report management duties (hiring, directing, owning execution), pointing to 11-3021, but the JD also emphasizes deep hands-on technical work and architecture decisions, which could support 15-1252. 11-3021 was chosen because people management and team-building are explicitly primary responsibilities.
The experience gate is stated as '8+ years of software/robotics engineering experience OR 4+ years of direct humanoid/manipulation/teleoperation domain experience'; the overall years minimum is set to 8 (the general path minimum). The 4-year domain-specific path is an alternative the posting explicitly allows.
A Bachelor's or Master's degree is listed but 'equivalent experience' is explicitly accepted, so the degree requirement is set to None.
Networking is listed in the requirements alongside specific protocols (DDS/UDP/TCP); these are treated as context for the networking requirement rather than separate skills, since no individual protocol is independently gated.
ROS 2, containerization/CI-CD, fleet-management tooling, MLOps, TypeScript, Kubernetes, React, CSS, warehouse systems integration (WMS/WES/MES/WCS), and cloud infrastructure all appear under 'Bonus Qualifications' and are marked as preferred.
No compensation range is stated in the posting.
Location is not explicitly stated in the posting; Austin, TX is inferred from Apptronik's known headquarters. The role requires up to 25% travel to deployment sites.
Read the full posting
The employer publishes the full description on their own site — read it there ↗. Or sign in to read it here — it's free, and it also lets you track this application.