Robotics & Autonomy Unit Lead

8d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Robotics & Autonomy Unit Lead role provides enterprise leadership and strategic accountability for bp’s automation agenda across facilities, ensuring coherent strategy, disciplined portfolio governance and safe, outcome-focused deployment into Upstream. The role sets the direction, guardrails and standards within which robotics, sensors and production technology delivery portfolios and squads operate, and is accountable for portfolio-level outcomes, risk management and capability maturity, rather than day-to-day delivery execution.

Requirements

Demonstrated leadership of large, complex, multi-discipline and multi-site portfolios operating at enterprise scale with end-to-end accountability for portfolio strategy, planning, prioritisation, value delivery, cost and risk governance, and performance outcomes.
Ability to build and manage strong relationships at a senior level.
Deep Upstream operational expertise, with the credibility and judgement to set strategic direction for automation in live, safety-critical environments.
Proven ability to define and govern portfolio strategy, balancing value, risk, cost, capability maturity and long-term sustainability.
Track record of building, scaling and sustaining high-performing cross-domain organisations, including squads and communities of practice.
Track record in driving innovation across bp's global portfolio and experience providing senior technical and strategic oversight across automation, advanced sensing/robotics and decision intelligence.
Strong enterprise-level influence and governance capability, operating effectively with VPs, SVPs, functional leaders and external partners.
Expertise in technology qualification, readiness assessment, scaling and standardisation, including progression from pilot to enterprise deployment.
Track record in operations delivery, including innovation and strong capability in portfolio value management, prioritisation and optimisation of interdependencies across domains and investment horizons.
Able to operate confidently as a single-point authority for automation strategy, standards and portfolio outcomes.
Strong stakeholder engagement skills, with experience influencing senior leadership and driving alignment across complex organisations.
Commercial Acumen
Communication
Data Analysis
Data cleansing and transformation
Data domain knowledge
Data Integration
Data Management
Data Manipulation
Data Sourcing
Data strategy and governance
Data Structures and Algorithms (Inactive)
Data visualization and interpretation
Digital Security
Extract, transform and load
Group Problem Solving

Responsibilities

Set strategy, priorities and sequencing for the full automation portfolio across facilities aligned to Upstream strategic objectives and business plans.
Own portfolio-level value delivery, ensuring investment decisions are value-led, outcomes are realised through adoption, and benefits are sustained in operations.
Establish and govern portfolio architecture, design principles and delivery guardrails, including reference architectures, patterns, standards and assurance expectations across all automation domains. Including creation and monitoring of key performance metrics.
Provide portfolio-level governance of HSSE, ITR, cyber and operational risk, ensuring technology readiness, deployment assurance and compliance prior to scaling. Including responsibility for HSSE of the lab spaces.
Lead portfolio-level risk, dependency and readiness management, including cross-domain interdependencies that sit above individual programmes or squads.
Develop a standardised approach for moving from R&D to "Operate".
Shape and govern vendor, partner and category strategy, ensuring long-term commercial coherence, technical consistency and effective relationship management and avoidance of fragmented point solutions.
Drive enterprise-wide standardisation and reuse of automation methods, platforms, data models and architectures to reduce complexity and lifecycle cost and patterns for rapid scaling and global deployment, including enterprise-wide is integration to systems of record and digital twins and bp compatible digital architectures.
Build and sustain organisational capability, including developing leaders, strengthening communities of practice and embedding automation expertise within squads.
Facilitate connections with Universities to develop capabilities that are not currently available from industry.
Ensure end-to-end digital and OT integration, including digital security compliance, enabling operator-ready, intelligence-enhanced insights through high -quality, trusted and governed data flows.
Act as a senior authority and decision maker, providing clear direction, arbitration and critical issue resolution across automation domains and senior partners. Keep up to date with "state of the art" in robotics and sensors with membership/participation in industrial forums.