Director of Robot Operations

Burro•Philadelphia, PA

About The Position

Burro is the leading robotics company in the world by number of robots working outdoors in the field with real customers. Our mission is to free people from tedious work and solve the critical labor shortages faced by farmers and others that work outdoors. To accomplish our mission, we need a world-class, diverse team where everyone feels comfortable sharing their ideas. With this in mind, we strive to create a work environment where every employee can be themselves and express their perspective – this enables us to deliver the most creative and innovative solutions to problems our customers face. Headquartered in Philadelphia with an office in central California, and backed by top Agtech and autonomy investors, including S2G, Catalyst, Translink, Cibus, FPrime, Toyota Ventures, FFVC, Xplorer, and Radicle, Burro was created to solve the labor shortages facing farmers using robotics. Burros can be described as Disney's Wall-E for agriculture and work outdoors, in a 1.0 format. They function, today, as computer vision based autonomous ground vehicles for carrying, towing, and scouting, and are designed to lay the base for the fully autonomous future of work outdoors. We have 700+ robots in our growing fleet deployed in paid commercial use within vineyards, nurseries, berries, and beyond, and demand for our product is accelerating, so we are growing our team. As the leader of Burro's Robot Support function, the Director of Robot Operations owns the customer-facing reliability and support experience of the entire fleet, and builds the strategy, processes, and tools required to scale that support far beyond today's headcount. This is a functional leadership role on an emerging team at Burro, critical to how we support customers at scale, and responsible for the team that ensures customers realize the return on investment they were promised. The Director of Robot Operations will directly manage the Robot Support team, currently consisting of three full time support engineers.

Requirements

B.S. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a closely related field
10+ years of relevant experience in robotics, technical support, or fleet operations/management, including 5+ years leading a team
Familiarity with autonomous mobility technology, such as computer vision, LiDAR, and other sensors, RTK GPS, electrical systems (including charging and batteries), mechanical systems
Demonstrated experience building scalable support processes, tools, or outsourced/partner support models, especially processes built around Zendesk and utilizing various AI-enabled tools
Exceptional responsiveness and communication skills; ability to excel at time-sensitive tasks and lead others through them
Ability to think like the customer, prioritize issues, and influence others across engineering, product, and operations to bring issues to closure
Experience debugging hardware and software, and coaching others to do the same
Strategic vision to scale the function efficiently as Burro grows our fleet to the tens of thousands
Experience utilizing Zendesk, Airtable, Formant, AWS, and/or other similar tools

Nice To Haves

Understanding of systems built in a ROS/ROS2 framework
Comfortable debugging code written in C++ & Python
Familiarity with electrical and mechanical repairs processes and tools (splicing, soldering, motor/gearbox diagnostics and repair, etc.)
Conversational Spanish

Responsibilities

Drive customer utilization and ROI by building a team that responds quickly and, increasingly, proactively, anticipating issues before customers report them
Serve as the internal voice of the customer and the escalation point for high severity or high visibility issues, ensuring engineering and product priorities reflect real field impact
Monitor fleet wide utilization, uptime, and diagnostic health, identifying trends across machines, regions, and customer segments
Analyze diagnostic data to define control limits and drive pre-emptive corrective action, translating customer sentiment and field quality data into actions
Cluster and prioritize failure modes for engineering, holding the team accountable for timely resolution, and use fleet wide data to influence the engineering roadmap
Build the strategy, processes, systems, and tools that let each Robot Support engineer support 500+ robots, a major scale up from current ratios
Develop and execute a plan to outsource portions of support to Dealer teams and third party providers, including training, documentation, and quality oversight
Coordinate the software deployment process across the fleet
Hire, coach, and grow the Robot Support team as it scales alongside the fleet