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World Labs is a frontier AI research and product company building world models for spatial and physical intelligence, with a focus on advancing robotics through simulation and AI. The company recently acquired SceniX, a robotics and simulation company, to bridge the gap between compelling robot demonstrations and reliable real-world deployment.
You will serve as Senior Business Development & Operations Lead, owning the full lifecycle of strategic customer engagements for the robotics technology. This is a highly technical, hands-on role at the intersection of Physical AI, simulation, spatial intelligence, and enterprise customers.
Key responsibilities include:
**Market & Technical Understanding**: Develop deep expertise in the robotics technology, its capabilities and limitations, and the evolving Physical AI ecosystem. Identify customers, use cases, and problems where the technology creates differentiated value, and develop informed perspectives on market direction.
**Customer Discovery & Feedback**: Spend significant time with customers understanding their workflows, technical constraints, deployment environments, and unmet needs. Build a tight feedback loop between customers and internal teams, translating problems back to research and engineering, synthesizing patterns, and distinguishing scalable product opportunities from one-off customization.
**Commercialization & Closing**: Shape and execute early customer engagements, pilots, and partnerships in collaboration with research, engineering, and product teams. Own strategic opportunities end-to-end: prospecting, discovery, technical evaluation, commercial structure, negotiation, contracting, and close.
**Operations & Function Building**: Establish the operational foundation for the commercial function, including customer and opportunity pipeline management, lightweight process development, follow-through, dependency resolution, and delivery accountability.
Required qualifications: 8+ years in related industries with deep experience in robotics, Physical AI, autonomous systems, simulation, or adjacent frontier technology. Technical fluency to engage credibly with researchers and engineers. Strong understanding of robotics technology generations from traditional automation through foundation models and sim-to-real. Demonstrated ability to develop and close complex B2B relationships. Strong market judgment across logistics, warehousing, industrial labs, manufacturing, automotive, defense, and emerging applications. Ability to turn technical capability into repeatable commercial value, identifying wedges, business models, pricing, and channel strategy while avoiding non-scalable bespoke work.
