Sr Business Development & Ops Lead, Robotics & Physical AI

World Labs•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

World Labs is a frontier AI research and product company advancing spatial intelligence, the next frontier beyond large language models. Co-founded by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall, the company is pioneering world models that perceive, generate, reason, and interact with virtual and physical worlds. The company’s flagship product, Marble, transforms text, images, and video into fully navigable 3D worlds, unlocking applications across gaming, film, architecture, robotics, and immersive digital experiences. Backed by leading investors and with over $1B raised, World Labs is assembling a world-class team at the intersection of AI research and real-world deployment. We are looking for a Sr Business Development and Operations Lead to help shape how World Labs brings its robotics technology to market. This is a highly technical, hands-on business development role at the intersection of Physical AI, simulation, spatial intelligence and enterprise customers. You will be part of our world-class teams partnering closely with research and engineering groups to understand what our technology can do today, where it is heading, and where it can create meaningful value for robotics teams in the real world. You will own the full lifecycle of strategic and operational customer engagements: from identifying the right problems and shaping the solution to building the commercial relationship and closing the deal.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in related industries.
Deep experience in robotics, Physical AI, autonomous systems, simulation, or an adjacent frontier technology, with firsthand exposure to customers, products, or deployments.
Technical fluency to engage credibly with researchers and engineers, with strong curiosity to understand how the technology works and draw connections between technical capabilities and market opportunities.
Strong understanding of the different generations of robotics technology - from traditional automation, through the computer-vision-driven wave of robotics, to today’s frontier in imitation learning, reinforcement learning, robot foundation models, and sim-to-real.
Demonstrated ability to develop and close complex B2B relationships, from ambiguous early conversations through signed agreements.
Strong market and adoption judgment: you understand where new robotics capabilities will find pull first, which customers and use cases to prioritize, and how to sequence entry across markets. You can reason across environments including logistics and warehousing, industrial and scientific labs, electronics manufacturing, automotive, defense, and emerging consumer/home applications.
Ability to turn technical capability into repeatable commercial value: identify the right wedge, business model, pricing, and channel strategy, and build a path from demo → paid PoC → production deployment while avoiding bespoke work that does not scale.
Comfortable quantifying and defending commercial decisions: you can build a credible pipeline forecast, price a pilot, or model a deal structure with real numbers behind it.
Builder mentality. You thrive in the ambiguity of early commercialization, creating the processes, tools, and operating cadence needed while figuring out what works.
Experience being an early or founding commercial hire inside a highly technical organization: you know how to earn credibility with researchers and engineers, not just with enterprise buyers.
Low ego and highly collaborative. You seek the best ideas regardless of where they come from, build closely with the team, and do what is needed to deliver results.

Responsibilities

Develop a deep understanding of our robotics technology, its capabilities and limitations, and how the broader robotics and Physical AI ecosystem is evolving.
Identify the customers, use cases, and problems where our technology can create differentiated value, and develop a strong point of view on where the market is heading.
Spend meaningful time with customers to understand their workflows, technical constraints, deployment environments, and unmet needs firsthand.
Build a tight feedback loop between customers and the team: translate problems back to research and engineering, synthesize patterns, and help distinguish scalable product opportunities from one-off customization.
Shape and execute early customer engagements, pilots, and partnerships in close collaboration with research, engineering, and product teams.
Own strategic opportunities end to end: from prospecting and discovery through technical evaluation, commercial structure, negotiation, contracting, and close.
Build the operational foundation for an early commercial function: maintain customer and opportunity pipelines, establish lightweight processes, drive follow-through, unblock dependencies, and make sure commitments get delivered.