SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 140,000 - 180,000 / annual
Standard Bots is the largest U.S. industrial robotics company by robots shipped, building the next generation of affordable, scalable industrial robots deployed across factory floors from independent machine shops to NASA and Lockheed Martin.
This Applications Engineering Manager role is a player-coach position leading a distributed team of Applications Engineers across the West Coast territory. You'll manage team development, workload distribution, and the quality of every customer engagement while remaining deeply hands-on with industrial automation work.
Key responsibilities include:
**Team Leadership & Development:** Manage and develop Applications Engineers across your territory, setting expectations, coaching on technical and customer-facing skills, conducting regular 1:1s, and owning capacity planning and workload distribution.
**Territory & Customer Ownership:** Own the applications engineering function for your territory from pre-sales through post-install success. Serve as the senior technical escalation point for complex integrations and difficult customer situations. Partner closely with the Regional Sales Manager on territory priorities and strategy. Maintain strong relationships with key customer accounts.
**Hands-On Technical Work:** Stay sharp by designing solutions, reviewing integrations, commissioning robotic cells, and supporting installs. Lead technically complex or strategically important customer engagements yourself. Review and sign off on solution designs, POCs, and integration plans. Travel to customer sites as needed (up to 25% domestically) for escalations and key moments.
**Standards & Continuous Improvement:** Define and enforce standards for how applications engineering work gets done in your territory—documentation, handoffs, commissioning checklists, customer training quality. Feed territory-level learnings back to the broader organization and help build playbooks and training materials.
You'll report directly to the VP of Applications Engineering.
Required qualifications: 5+ years of hands-on applications engineering, systems integration, or automation engineering experience; 2+ years of people management or team lead experience; fluency across mechanical, electrical, and software domains (PLC programming, ladder logic, pneumatics, DC power systems, robot programming, Python scripting, CAD); strong customer-facing presence; experience managing distributed teams; comfort with up to 25% domestic travel; Bachelor's degree in Mechanical, Electrical, Mechatronics, or related engineering discipline (or equivalent hands-on experience).
Nice-to-have: prior experience with collaborative robots (UR, Fanuc, KUKA, ABB); background scaling applications engineering or field engineering functions; experience with vision systems, force/torque sensing, or custom end-of-arm tooling; familiarity with machine tending, palletizing, welding, or assembly automation applications.
