The Role
Leads and supervises engineering teams, coordinates technical projects, manages budgets and timelines, evaluates feasibility, oversees facility and equipment operations, approves product designs, recruits and develops staff, and presents engineering proposals and findings to stakeholders and clients.
Summary Generated by Built In
Engineering Manager
Lead assigned engineering teams and own their people, technical execution and product quality.You will turn product priorities into credible engineering commitments and develop robotic subsystems that work reliably together, from prototypes through validation, repeatable production and customer use.
This role combines direct people leadership with strong technical judgment. You will review difficult design decisions, build capable technical leads and ensure that engineering work improves performance, reliability and lifecycle cost. Bring depth in at least one discipline and the ability to lead across mechanical, electrical, embedded, controls and software interfaces.
How the role works with other teams
You own people, capability, technical execution and quality for assigned engineering teams. Product owns priorities and product requirements; system technical leads own system architecture and interfaces. The TPM owns integrated program execution. Operations owns procurement, manufacturing, deployment and service. Formal technical and safety approvals follow assigned company authority.
Leadership, technical decisions and productization
- Hire, coach and develop engineers and technical leads. Establish clear subsystem ownership, expectations and career paths; run regular feedback and performance reviews, address performance gaps, and build the capabilities required by the product roadmap.
- Develop technical leaders and effective delegation so the team can own increasingly complex work. Identify critical skill gaps, strengthen onboarding and knowledge sharing, and maintain a practical hiring and development plan.
- Own engineering decisions within your scope with architects and domain leads. Review alternatives using calculations, prototypes, simulation and test evidence; assess performance, reliability, safety implications and cost, and document the rationale for consequential trade-offs.
- Maintain clear mechanical, electrical, firmware, controls and software interface requirements with system technical leads. Address timing, data contracts, failure behavior and compatibility as applicable; promote common designs and reuse across variants while making exceptions and their costs explicit.
- Bring manufacturing, test and service needs into design reviews early. Evaluate assembly effort, testability, diagnostics, maintainability, supplier constraints and lifecycle cost alongside product performance; ensure design choices support repeatable production and field use.
- Own engineering readiness for prototype, validation and pilot-production builds. Ensure released designs, bills of materials, firmware and software versions, test procedures and technical documentation are coherent; work with suppliers and Operations to resolve build defects and qualify changes.
- Define risk-based verification with system and validation owners, tracing requirements and failure modes to tests. Cover representative parcel flows, fleet sizes, peak workloads, relevant communication or sensor faults, degraded operation and recovery; use results to expose system limits.
- Build reusable test capability through appropriate simulation, test rigs, hardware-in-the-loop and automated regression. Ensure reproducible results across supported configurations, and design in telemetry, logs, health checks and diagnostics that accelerate fault isolation in the lab and field.
Verification, release quality and field reliability
- Own the readiness recommendation for your engineering scope, including test evidence, critical defects, operating limits and configuration compatibility. Review change impact on deployed systems and recovery options; ensure safety-relevant changes receive required technical and safety approvals, including independent review where applicable.
- Lead significant defects through containment, root-cause analysis, corrective action and verification. Reproduce field failures, address gaps in requirements, design or tests, and check for recurrence. Feed reliability and operating data back into designs and engineering priorities.
- Convert priorities into work packages, credible estimates and capacity-based commitments. Balance new development, reliability, technical debt and sustaining work with Product; provide theTPM with clear dependencies, risks and recovery options when plans change.
- Use a focused engineering scorecard to improve delivery predictability, validation effectiveness, release quality and field reliability. Work with Product,Systems, Quality and Operations to resolve bottlenecks, maintain useful documentation and turn improvements into repeatable engineering practices.
- A capable engineering team with clear subsystem ownership, technical leadership and development plans.
- Credible engineering commitments and reviewed designs with documented technical trade-offs.
- Maintained interfaces, reusable tests and traceable release evidence for supported configurations.
- Verified corrective actions, effective diagnostics and engineering inputs for repeatable production and service.
Assess team capability, subsystem ownership, architecture interfaces, delivery commitments and major product risks. Establish a baseline for validation gaps and field reliability; agree hiring, development and engineering improvements with accountable owners.
- Typically 12+ years of relevant engineering experience, including 4+ years of direct engineering people management. Technical scope and leadership results matter more than tenure alone.
- Evidence of delivering a complex robotic, industrial, mechatronic or embedded product or subsystem into production or customer use, including responsibility for its performance after launch.
- Deep expertise in at least one relevant engineering discipline, with the ability to review technical work and make informed decisions across system boundaries.
- A record of consequential design decisions, integration or reliability problems resolved with evidence, and improvements to productization, testability or maintainability.
- Demonstrated hiring, coaching, performance management and development of technical leads, together with credible capacity planning and engineering delivery commitments.
- Practical experience with requirements, design reviews, automated or instrumented testing, controlled releases, configuration management and verified root-cause resolution.
- An engineering or related degree, or equivalent practical experience. Clear communication and effective collaboration with Product, systems specialists, manufacturing, quality and field teams.
Autonomous mobile robots, warehouse automation, fleet orchestration, embedded or motion-control systems, distributed operational software, simulation and hardware-in-the-loop testing.Experience with production ramp, supplier engineering and customer-system integration will be valuable.
Over the following6 to 12 months, deliver measurable progress against agreed baselines in:
- Stronger technical ownership and demonstrable growth of engineers and technical leads.
- More dependable engineering commitments, with less late rework and earlier resolution of integration risks.
- Better verification and release evidence, fewer escaped defects and fewer recurring field failures.
- Improved performance, availability, recovery and lifecycle cost within the team's scope, against agreed operating conditions and baselines.
Skills Required
- 12 or more years of engineering experience in a management role
- Bachelor's degree in engineering
- Analytical and mathematical problem-solving abilities
- Leadership skills to manage and develop an engineering team
- Organizational and project management skills
- Ability to multitask and work in a timeline-driven environment
- Strong interpersonal communication skills, including explaining complex topics to broad audiences
- Ability to work independently and collaboratively
- Master's degree in engineering management or business administration
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The Company
What We Do
Unbox Robotics builds software-defined robotics systems to enable logistics players to automate and radically improve their operations on-demand in a limited footprint and capital. We are applying proprietary Swarm Intelligence and ML algorithms inspired by nature to redefine the way companies sort and ship orders. Our 1st product UnboxSort is the world's first of its kind patented AI-powered parcel sorting robotic system that gets installed in <2 weeks, saves ~50% - 80% area, and improves productivity by > 3X to 5X. We have a strong team of alumni from the National University of Singapore, the University of York, and the Indian School of Business with international experience in robotics, manufacturing, and logistics. We are backed by 3one4 Capital, Sixth Sense Ventures, SOSV, Entrepreneur First, Redstart Labs (Info Edge), Arali Ventures, CIIE, Beenext, WEH Ventures, Force Ventures, Veda VC, and an impressive set of angel investors.
