Technical Project Manager, Robotics Software

Slip Robotics is at the forefront of robotic automation, delivering cutting-edge solutions that transform how businesses move goods. Our autonomous platforms redefine efficiency, reliability, and scalability in logistics. We’re a fast-growing team of innovators passionate about helping customers adopt automation seamlessly and successfully.

Our robotics software team ships code that drives real robots in real customer facilities. Getting a release from “merged” to “running reliably across the fleet” involves test planning, site coordination, qualification, staged deployment, and post-release monitoring. Your job is to own that machinery.

As a TPM for Robotics Software, you run the operational backbone of the team: keeping tasking and priorities organized across concurrent workstreams, planning and coordinating testing from the simulation to live customer sites, driving releases through qualification and deployment, and managing post-release observation so problems are caught by us before they’re caught by customers. You’ll partner daily with the CTO, engineering leads, product, hardware, and deployment/field teams. This is not a ceremony-runner role.

The right person is technical enough to read a failure table, ask the right question about a regression, push back on a release that isn’t ready, and organized enough that nobody has to wonder what state a release is in.

Responsibilities:

• Tasking & workstream coordination. Keep the software team’s backlog, sprint planning, and cross-team dependencies organized. Make status visible without making engineers write status reports.
• Test planning & coordination. Own the test plan for each release: what gets tested, where (bench, test robots, pilot sites, customer sites), by whom, and against what pass/fail criteria. Coordinate robot time, site access, and field resources so testing never becomes the bottleneck by accident.
• Release management. Drive releases through qualification to fleet deployment: entry/exit criteria, go/no-go reviews, staged rollout plans, rollback criteria, and clear communication to every team that needs to know what’s shipping and when.
• Post-release observation. Own the watch period after every release: monitoring fleet health metrics and failure rates, triaging regressions, routing field issues to the right owner, and closing the loop from field failure back into the backlog.
• Cross-functional partnership. Be the connective tissue between software engineering and product, hardware, deployment, and customer-facing teams.
• Process that scales. Build lightweight, durable process that makes the next release cheaper than the last one and survives team growth.

Requirements

• 5+ years in technical program management, release management, or engineering operations for software that ships to physical systems in robotics, automotive, aerospace, medical devices, or similar hardware/software products.
• Experience owning a release process end to end: qualification criteria, go/no-go decisions, staged rollouts, and post-release monitoring.
• Experience planning and coordinating testing that involves physical hardware and field environments.
• Technical fluency to engage engineers on their terms: comfortable reading dashboards, logs, and failure data, and able to distinguish a real blocker from noise. An engineering background is a strong plus.
• Demonstrated experience designing work flows and, more importantly, gaining adoption of the workflows from all stakeholders.
• A track record of driving accountability across teams you don’t manage, including delivering hard messages about readiness and slipping dates.
• Preferred: Direct experience with autonomous mobile robots, AGVs, or fleet-deployed robotic systems.
• Experience with fleet observability tooling such as telemetry dashboards, log analysis, failure classification.
• Familiarity with functional-safety or regulated-industry release processes (ISO 13849, ISO 3691-4, or comparable).
• Experience coordinating testing or deployments at customer sites, including customer-facing communication.
• Experience in a startup or scale-up environment where you built the process rather than inherited it.