Applications Engineering Manager (Boston)

Standard Bots•Boston, MA

5d•$140,000 - $180,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Standard Bots is seeking an Applications Engineering Manager to lead a team of Applications Engineers. This is a player-coach role requiring hands-on industrial automation experience, including commissioning robotic cells. The manager will oversee team development, workload, and customer engagements, acting as a senior technical escalation point and ensuring high-quality applications engineering standards. The role involves direct customer interaction, collaboration with sales, and hands-on technical work, including solution design and commissioning. The position also requires defining and enforcing standards, documenting processes, and contributing to the development of playbooks and training materials. This role requires up to 25% domestic travel.

Requirements

Fluent across mechanical, electrical, and software: PLC programming and ladder logic, pneumatics, DC power systems, robot programming, Python scripting, CAD.
5+ years of hands-on applications engineering, systems integration, or automation engineering experience.
2+ years of people management or team lead experience.
Strong customer-facing presence; ability to manage difficult customer conversations, set expectations clearly, and represent the company credibly at a senior level.
Experience managing a distributed team or territory.
Comfort with up to 25% domestic travel.
Bachelor's degree in Mechanical, Electrical, Mechatronics, or a related engineering discipline, or equivalent hands-on experience.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience with collaborative robots (UR, Fanuc, KUKA, ABB, or similar).
Background scaling an applications engineering or field engineering function.
Experience with vision systems, force/torque sensing, or custom end-of-arm tooling.
Familiarity with machine tending, palletizing, welding, or assembly automation applications.

Responsibilities

Manage and develop a team of Applications Engineers across your territory, setting expectations, coaching technical and customer-facing skills, and building a high-performing team.
Own capacity planning and workload distribution across the team, ensuring the right engineer is on the right job.
Serve as the technical and cultural standard-setter for the team.
Conduct regular 1:1s, performance conversations, and development planning.
Own the applications engineering function for the territory, from pre-sales POC support through post-install customer success.
Act as the senior technical escalation point for complex integrations, difficult customer situations, or problematic installs.
Partner closely with the Regional Sales Manager on territory priorities, pipeline, and customer strategy.
Maintain strong relationships with key customer accounts in the territory.
Design solutions, review integrations, commission cells, and support installs when needed.
Lead or co-lead technically complex or strategically important customer engagements.
Review and sign off on solution designs, POCs, and integration plans produced by the team.
Travel to customer sites as needed (up to 25% domestically) for escalations, key installs, and customer relationship moments.
Define and enforce the standard for how applications engineering work gets done in the territory.
Feed territory-level learnings back to the broader applications engineering organization and to product and engineering teams.
Help build playbooks, templates, and training materials to improve team performance and deployment repeatability.