Pickle Robot is hiring a Senior Product Manager to own our Autonomy Platform — the perception, planning, and motion stack that powers every Pickle robot on every loading dock today, and that we're building into the foundation for truck loading and an industry autonomy platform for tomorrow.
You'll be the PM for the brain of the robot. Your internal customers are the autonomy, perception, controls, and ML engineering teams. Your external customers are 3PLs, parcel carriers, and retailers who don't care how we did it — they care that the robot unloads their trailers reliably and safely, dock hour after dock hour.
In this platform-focused capacity, your approach to reliability per dock-hour, simulation depth, development speed, and machine-learning failure scenarios will mirror the way traditional PMs evaluate user-facing features. You will be responsible for crafting actionable PRDs that serve as technical blueprints for engineering teams while rigorously upholding performance standards, specifically pick speeds, intervention rates, and recovery times.
What You’ll Accomplish:
Own the Autonomy Platform roadmap. From perception and grasp planning through motion control and exception handling — define what we build, what we don't, and in what order. Partner with engineering leadership to make tradeoffs between current customer reliability and future capability.
Productize the autonomy stack. Pickle's autonomy isn't just code that runs the robot — it's the platform we believe will power our own truck-loading product and, in the longer term, serve as an autonomy layer for the broader industry. You'll help shape what that productization looks like.
Treat simulation as a product. SIM is how we ship safely. Define how the simulation environment evolves to support faster iteration, broader scenario coverage, and pre-deployment validation that actually predicts field behavior.
Reason about probabilistic systems. Every ML model in our stack has a failure mode. You'll define what "good enough to ship" looks like — failure modes, fallbacks, human-in-the-loop thresholds, intervention rates — and you'll defend those criteria against demo-driven optimism.
Get out of the office. Pickle PMs go where things happen. You'll spend time at customer docks, with operators, watching real trailers get unloaded and real edge cases get caught.
Who You Are:
5+ years of product management experience, with at least 2 years shipping products where ML, robotics, or other probabilistic systems were core to value — not adjacent to it.
Comfortable with a hardware+software product. You understand that hardware iterations are slow and expensive, software iterations are fast, and ML behavior is neither, and you scope accordingly.
Fluent with autonomy and ML engineering teams. You don't need to implement gradient descent yourself, but you can have a real conversation about perception failure modes, planning constraints, and model evaluation.
Platform PM instincts. You've shipped internal platforms, SDKs, simulation environments, or developer tools — and you measure success in downstream team velocity and reliability, not feature count.
Strong writer. PRDs, one-pagers, MRDs, release notes. We write things down at Pickle.
Bias to action and to simplification. You ship; you don't over-architect; you push back when scope creeps.
Comfortable with creative conflict. You disagree well, assume positive intent, and stay focused on the idea.
Bonus: prior experience in robotics, logistics, supply chain, simulation tooling, or AV stacks.
Location & TravelBased at our Charlestown, MA headquarters, in-office at least 3 days per week.
Approximately 25% travel
Skills Required
- 5+ years of product management experience
- 2 years shipping products with ML or robotics
- Strong writing skills for PRDs and release notes
- Experience with hardware and software products
- Experience with simulation environments or internal platforms
What We Do
We believe the best working experience is one where machines do the heavy lifting and people do the problem solving. Our robots work with people in the messy world of warehouse loading docks, reducing the real physical pain of unloading trucks and containers radically amplifying what each person can accomplish. Founded by an exceptional cast of robotics and machine learning experts, Pickle creates robots that work alongside people in the very messy world of the loading dock, reducing the backbreaking human effort that goes into getting your online orders to your door.
