Senior Robot Test Operations Manager
Agility Robotics · Onsite- Pittsburgh, PA
- Level
- Manager
- Team
- Controls
- Experience asked
- 5+ years
- Industry
- Industrial
- Posted
- 17 days ago
The role in 30 seconds
A management controls role at Agility Robotics (industrial) in Onsite- Pittsburgh, PA. Play a key role in ensuring that humanoid robots deployed at customer sites are safe, reliable, and ready - not just functional in a lab.
- They ask for
- 5+ years
- Tools it names
- Root cause, Validation (IQ/OQ/PQ), Robotics, Automation, Tooling
Read from the posting. The full description is below.
From the plant jobs report · week of October 19, 2026
Controls Engineer roles in Pennsylvania: typical posted base $89k–$133k.
Median of the low and high ends of 8 live postings that list pay, out of 22 controls engineer openings in Pennsylvania, read from manufacturers' own careers sites.
Pennsylvania plant jobs report →Pay by team and state →What moves pay →
How this role compares
Against 21 other live controls postings in Pennsylvania.
- Base pay
- Not listed in this posting
- Experience asked
- Typical (5+ years)
Typical $89k–$133k, from 8 postings that list pay.
Similar roles usually ask 5+ years.
Skills these teams ask for most
- ✓ Automation 77%
- PLC 68%
- ✓ Root cause 36%
- ✓ Validation (IQ/OQ/PQ) 32%
- ✓ Robotics 32%
- Lean 27%
✓ = this posting asks for it too. % = share of similar postings that mention it.
Stands out: this posting asks for Tooling, which few similar roles mention. If you have it, lead with it.
At a glance
Pulled from the posting text. If it's not listed here, the posting didn't say.
How to get in at this plant
Five moves over a week or two. The first one takes ten minutes.
- 1
Pick 2–3 people on the Controls team at Agility Robotics
Engineers who joined in the last year or two reply the most. Use the team search on this page to find them.
- 2
Send a short, curious note
One real question about their work. No favors yet. Each person gets a different note, written for this role.
- 3
Turn a reply into a short call
Questions worth asking about this team:
- What does a normal week look like on your team?
- How did you land the job? What stood out in your interviews?
- 4
Apply with someone vouching for you
If the call went well, ask whether they’d pass your résumé to the hiring manager. Send your résumé link, apply that day, and let them know.
- 5
Bring proof to the interview
One page of before-and-after numbers from projects you led: scrap, OEE, cycle time, cost. Plant managers hire on results.
Full description from Agility RoboticsAs posted on their careers site.ShowHide
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.
You will be responsible for maximizing robot fleet uptime, designing and driving endurance and validation testing, and serving as the strategic conduit between Commercial, Software, and Systems Engineering teams to continuously evolve our test strategy. Your work will directly influence the quality and reliability of Digit in customer warehouses.
About the Work
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 - in an operational test environment
- ✓Previous experience in high-growth, fast-paced environments where self-direction and bias for action are essential
- ✓Strong instincts for customer-representative testing: designing scenarios that reflect real deployment conditions, not idealized lab conditions
- ✓Proficiency with log analysis and telemetry tools; ability to correlate hardware, software, and sensor data to identify root cause
- ✓Experience with structured issue management (Jira or equivalent) including release labeling, triage workflows, and escalation protocols
- ✓Familiarity with reliability engineering concepts: MTBI, intervention rate analysis, wear pattern identification in integrated mechanical systems
Why Join Agility Robotics?
- ✓Play a key role in ensuring that humanoid robots deployed at customer sites are safe, reliable, and ready - not just functional in a lab
- ✓Work in a fast-moving, highly collaborative environment where your fi
Show full description ↓Show less ↑
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 Senior Test Operations Manager role is a critical role in making that happen.
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
