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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # AI Data Operations Lead - **Company:** Roboforce Inc. - **Location:** Milpitas, CA, United States - **Experience:** Expert - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, DataOps, Reinforcement Learning, Robot Operating System, Data Pipelines - **Published:** July 24, 2026 - **Apply:** https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=5d75a1a35b378abd ## About the Role * Bachelor's degree or above; technical degrees preferred. * 5+ years of experience in technical operations, program management, or cross-functional operations leadership, ideally in a hardware, robotics, or R&D environment. * Demonstrated experience managing people, operators, or vendor teams - including hiring, training, scheduling, and performance management. * Strong ability to translate technical priorities from research and engineering teams into scalable operational workflows, SOPs, and execution plans, without needing to write code or design systems yourself. * Comfortable partnering closely with AI researchers and engineers, and fluent enough in technical concepts (data pipelines, model training, robot operations) to coordinate effectively - but this is a people and process leadership role, not a hands-on engineering role. * Excellent communication, organizational, and cross-functional leadership skills. * Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, ambiguous R&D environment where priorities shift quickly. * Requires 5 days/week in-office collaboration with the teams. Bonus Qualifications * Experience supporting Physical AI, robot learning, imitation learning, or VLA development. * Experience with teleoperation systems, human demonstration pipelines, or robotics data collection. * Experience managing large-scale annotation operations and external vendors. * Familiarity with robot benchmarking and evaluation workflows. * Experience designing internal operational tools, dashboards, or workflow automation systems. ## Description RoboForce is an AI robotics company developing Physical AI-powered Robo-Labor for dull, dirty, and dangerous work. The company's robots are engineered for demanding industrial environments, with a focus on real-world deployment and scalability. We are looking for AI Data Operations Lead to lead and own the engineering of systems that turn embodied AI into real-world robot behavior. You will be the technical owner and lead for the full embodied systems stack - the onboard AI system, the data collection system, the teleoperation systems, and the on-robot reinforcement learning system - driving the direction hands-on and closing the loop between data, models, and action in the physical world. Responsibilities * Own the operational execution of RoboForce's AI learning programs, translating research priorities into scalable execution plans. * Partner closely with AI researchers and engineers to coordinate cross-functional execution across AI, Hardware, Robotics Software, and Operations. * Recruit, develop, and retain a 20-50 person team across data collection, annotation, and teleoperation - setting clear performance expectations, building career development pathways, and fostering a culture of ownership, safety, and continuous improvement. * Define, track, and report operational KPIs - including data collection throughput, robot uptime, and evaluation turnaround - to drive decisions and communicate operational health to leadership. * Own robot fleet health and readiness - driving preventive and corrective maintenance, and tracking uptime to ensure robots are mission-ready for data collection and evaluation. * Drive program execution, resolve blockers, manage priorities, and continuously improve operational efficiency. * Own end-to-end execution of robot data collection and annotation programs, including operational workflows, SOPs, operator training, scheduling, quality assurance, and vendor management. * Build scalable operational processes that consistently deliver high-quality datasets supporting AI development. * Partner with AI researchers to organize evaluation resources, execute testing plans, and deliver timely, reliable evaluation results. * Ensure experiment outcomes, operational learnings, and program progress are accurately captured and communicated across cross-functional teams. * Foster a culture of operational excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement while establishing scalable operational processes that enable the AI organization to grow. ## Related Videos - [AI beyond the code: Master your organisational AI implementation.](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1248-ai-beyond-the-code-master-your-organisational-ai-implementation) - [On the straight and narrow path - How to get cars to drive themselves using reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/205-on-the-straight-and-narrow-path-how-to-get-cars-to-drive-themselves-using-reinforcement-learning-and-trajectory-optimization) - [Why and when should we consider Stream Processing frameworks in our solutions](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1085-why-and-when-should-we-consider-stream-processing-frameworks-in-our-solutions) - [Robots are coming into the wild! Full-Stack Robotics Engineers, be ready!](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/479-robots-are-coming-into-the-wild-full-stack-robotics-engineers-be-ready) - [Adding knowledge to open-source LLMs](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1522-adding-knowledge-to-open-source-llms) - [Python-Based Data Streaming Pipelines Within Minutes](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1233-python-based-data-streaming-pipelines-within-minutes) ## Related Articles - [How to Become an AI Engineer](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/331-how-to-become-an-ai-engineer) - [What Industries Outside of AI Are Hiring The Most AI Experts?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/98-what-industries-outside-of-ai-are-hiring-the-most-ai-experts) - [MLOps – What’s the deal behind it?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/125-mlops-what-s-the-deal-behind-it) - [MLOps And AI Driven Development](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/82-mlops-and-ai-driven-development) - [Coffee with Developers - Maria Apazoglou - Making AI understandable for all in production](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/475-coffee-with-developers-maria-apazoglou-making-ai-understandable-for-all-in-production) - [Stephan Gillich - Bringing AI Everywhere](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/489-stephan-gillich-bringing-ai-everywhere)