Project Manager - Physical AI Lab & Research
Summary
Oversee robotics lab initiatives, tracking progress, blockers, and timelines for teleoperation, data collection, and AI model evaluation across multi-discipline teams.
About Centific
At Centific, people are at the center of our culture.We constantly seek out opportunities for people to enhance their skills,
and emphasize work-life balance for all our employees.We believe that competition can bring out the very best in people
– from our annual creative film and speech contests to our weekly office game tournaments,we mix work and play to engage our people and help our clients succeed.
About Job
GENERAL SUMMARY
The Project Manager for Robotics Lab & Research keeps the Physical AI Center of Excellence (PACE) moving by tracking progress, surfacing blockers, and managing timeline and scope across new lab and research initiatives — teleoperation, data collection, annotation, and model evaluation for robotics. This role is the single source of truth for where each initiative stands: what is on track, what is at risk, and what needs a decision. It does not own the technical work; it owns visibility, coordination, and accountability across a multi-geography, multi-discipline team (hardware, simulation, data pipeline, and real-world evaluation), ensuring initiatives are scoped clearly, tracked consistently, and delivered on time. Extensive project management experience in a technical, hardware, or research environment is required.
PRINCIPAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
- Track progress on all new robotics lab and research initiatives, maintaining a live view of status, milestones, and completion against plan.
- Define and manage scope for each initiative — capture goals, deliverables, and boundaries up front, and control scope changes as work evolves.
- Build and maintain timelines and roadmaps across concurrent initiatives; keep target dates realistic and current.
- Identify, log, and highlight blockers early — technical, hardware/procurement, staffing, or dependency-related — and drive them to resolution or escalation.
- Run a regular reporting and status cadence (weekly updates, dashboards, standups) so leadership and contributors always know where things stand.
- Coordinate across hardware, software/AI, annotation, and evaluation teams to keep initiatives aligned and hand-offs clean.
- Flag timeline slips, scope creep, and resource gaps to the practice owner and stakeholders, with clear options and recommended next steps.
- Track hardware procurement, lab equipment, and vendor timelines (including cross-border shipping, customs, and tariff considerations) as initiative dependencies.
- Maintain a risk and dependency register; keep mitigation actions assigned and moving.
- Ensure initiatives follow the lab's data and delivery conventions (e.g. brs-ctrl, HDF5 / LeRobot) so outputs are usable downstream.
- Drive initiative closure — confirm deliverables met scope, capture documentation, and hand off to research and delivery teams.
- Continuously improve how initiatives are scoped, tracked, and reported across the lab and its regional sites.
- Additional duties as required.
EDUCATIONAL AND TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
- College/University degree — BA/BS in Engineering, Robotics, Computer Science, Business, or a related technical field.
- Minimum 5 years of experience in project or program management roles, ideally in robotics, hardware, R&D, or industrial automation.
- Strong hands-on experience with tracking and reporting tools (e.g. project trackers, roadmaps, dashboards) and Microsoft Office 365 (Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint).
- Working knowledge of PowerBI and internet-based platforms for status reporting and tracking.
- Familiarity with robotics/AI development workflows — hardware-software integration, teleoperation, data collection, simulation, or model evaluation — enough to understand dependencies and blockers.
- Advanced certification (PMP, PgMP) and business acumen preferred.