USA, alternatively Europe
Head of Technical Qualification, Emerging Robotics
You test, teardown and decide when hundreds of robotics startups are ready for the factories of our clients, and are their partner how to get there.
The Head of Technical Qualification, Emerging Robotics will be the technical lubricant between emerging robotics companies and the large automation programs Cenotian manages for industrial end customers. You will build Cenotian's independent standard for assessing these companies, their products, and their ability to deliver repeatable commercial deployments. Your work separates a compelling concept from a product that can be built, accepted, serviced, and trusted.
Context
Cenotian is the market maker for robotics, restoring industrial sovereignty in the West. We provide the capital and capabilities required to move industrial automation from ambition into deployed systems across the US and Europe. We manage large automation spend for end customers, both enterprise and SMBs Cenotian works directly with large to small industrial operators that need to automate factories, processes, and multi-site production networks. Our Value Engineering practice converts their operating priorities into automation programs that the supplier market can execute. Technical Qualification Services provide the independent evidence layer behind supplier selection, project financing, and deployment. For established machine builders and system integrators, TQS determines what the organization can design, build, commission, and support. This role owns the separate emerging-robotics lane within TQS. Emerging robotics companies create a different qualification problem. Their products may be technically exceptional while their delivery record, certification, manufacturing controls, service organization, and commercial discipline remain immature. Conventional venture diligence focuses on market size, founders, and financing. Conventional engineering review often establishes whether the machine works once. Neither determines whether an enterprise operator can rely on the company across a commercial deployment and subsequent rollout. Technical Qualification helps emerging machine builders turn ambiguity into a decision and a readiness optimization plan for large pools of automation spend. The output states what the product can do, where it has been proved, what the company can deliver, which dependencies remain fragile, and which conditions must be satisfied before end-customer spend can be committed. For companies with a credible path forward, TQS provides prioritized technical recommendations across the bill of materials, supply chain, manufacturing system, and deployment model. The objective is measurable: accelerate deployment, reduce working capital and capital expenditure, improve unit and project economics, and qualify the company for larger pools of automation spend across the Cenotian network.
Position overview
The Head of Technical Qualification, Emerging Robotics owns the technical qualification method, service offer, delivery quality, client relationships, commercial model, team, partner network, and structured evidence produced by the practice. This is a builder's role with direct field accountability. You will conduct qualifications personally, partner with founders and their technical and manufacturing teams, define the conditions under which a Cenotian customer can rely on a product, and turn those decisions into a service that operators actively seek out. The role covers the emerging robotics company as a delivery system. Product performance matters alongside commercial traction, team execution, certification, manufacturing readiness, integration effort, acceptance risk, unit economics, contract discipline, software continuity, service capacity, and the ability to survive a failed component or departed founder. Travel: extensive travel to startup shop floors.
- Reports to:
- Head of Special Missions Group before launch; Co-founder / CEO after launch
- Location:
- USA, alternatively Europe
Key responsibilities
- 01
Define the qualification standard
- Build the startup-specific Technical Qualification methodology while preserving alignment with Cenotian's broader qualification and underwriting architecture.
- Define hard gates, scoring dimensions, evidence standards, conditions, escalation rules, requalification triggers, and reasons to decline.
- Assess companies through the risks they create in a deployment: completion, acceptance, technical performance, integration, continuity, and service.
- Distinguish strong evidence from polished self-reporting, paid pilots from commercial deployments, and serial readiness from a founder-supported demonstration.
- Design substitute-evidence rules for products with limited delivery history without allowing a thin track record to disappear inside a composite score.
- Make the method comparable across companies while preserving expert judgment for genuinely novel technology.
- 02
Qualify the company, team, and product
- Assess founder and leadership execution, technical depth, organizational dependencies, hiring gaps, and the concentration of critical knowledge.
- Review commercial traction, delivered-unit history, customer references, cancellations, returns, deployment outcomes, and the gap between pilots and repeat orders.
- Inspect product architecture, bills of materials, software dependencies, configuration control, release discipline, cybersecurity, safety concepts, certification status, and technical documentation.
- Examine manufacturing strategy, supplier concentration, component availability, quality controls, test coverage, change management, and the ability to reproduce the product outside the prototype team.
- Review field reliability, uptime, failure logs, service interventions, warranty history, spares, remote support, and evidence from the exact product generation proposed for deployment.
- Test whether founders and technical leaders can explain limitations, failure modes, and unresolved questions without retreating into product narrative.
- 03
Determine integration and deployment readiness
- Establish what a system integrator or operator must provide before the product can work in a live application.
- Assess interfaces with robots, controls, safety systems, production equipment, data infrastructure, operator workflows, and existing enterprise architecture.
- Define the application envelope within which the available evidence remains valid.
- Review proof-of-concept design, site prerequisites, commissioning plans, FAT and SAT, acceptance criteria, change control, operator training, and support responsibilities.
- Identify where the startup depends on system integrators and whether its commercial model strengthens or attempts to bypass the integration ecosystem.
- Determine whether the deployment model can repeat across customers, sites, and geographies without the founders becoming the permanent integration team.
- 04
Turn evidence into decisions and readiness optimization
- Produce concise qualification reports that state what was observed, what was independently verified, what remains unproved, and what Cenotian can rely on.
- Translate technical findings into approval conditions, pilot boundaries, holdbacks, evidence requests, monitoring, requalification, or rejection.
- Separate the quality of the underlying technology from the readiness of the company to manufacture, deploy, and support it repeatedly.
- Give viable companies a prioritized readiness optimization plan rather than a score with generic recommendations.
- Recommend changes to the bill of materials, component standardization, alternate sourcing, make-or-buy choices, supplier concentration, production testing, quality controls, manufacturing flow, inventory strategy, and serviceability.
- Improve the deployment model through clearer site prerequisites, reusable integration packages, commissioning methods, acceptance criteria, training, remote support, spares, and partner responsibilities.
- Tie each recommendation to an operating or economic mechanism: faster build and commissioning cycles, less cash trapped in inventory and work in progress, lower production and deployment capex, reduced delivered cost, stronger gross margin, or lower lifetime service burden.
- Sequence the recommendations into an evidence roadmap that shows what the company must prove to qualify for larger work packages and pools of end-customer spend in the Cenotian network.
- Present findings and recommendations to founders, Finance and Underwriting, enterprise clients, system integrators, Commercial, Special Missions, and executive leadership.
- Defend inconvenient conclusions when founder charisma, investor reputation, customer excitement, or strategic interest points in another direction.
- 05
Build a market-facing qualification and readiness service
- Turn the internal method into a paid external service for emerging robotics companies, enterprise operators, system integrators, OEMs, and capital providers.
- Define qualification and readiness-optimization packages, pricing, scope, turnaround time, customer inputs, deliverables, quality controls, and acceptance conditions.
- Create a clear progression from initial diagnosis through improvement plan, evidence closure, requalification, and access to suitable deployment opportunities.
- Build the Cenotian Validated designation as a difficult and credible signal of integration readiness. The designation signals integration readiness only; safety certification, regulatory approval, and investment recommendations remain outside its scope.
- Win the first mandates personally through founder relationships, robotics investors, enterprise buyers, OEMs, and Cenotian's supplier network.
- Protect qualification independence from commercial pressure, ecosystem relationships, paid participation, and the desire to place a product into a live project.
- Make rejection private, specific, and useful while keeping the external standard uncompromised.
- 06
Place qualified emerging robotics into enterprise programs
- Work alongside Value Engineering teams as they convert end-customer processes into funded automation work packages, supplier requirements, tenders, proofs of concept, and rollout plans.
- Translate each work package into the product maturity, integration capability, manufacturing capacity, service coverage, and evidence an emerging robotics company must demonstrate.
- Determine which qualified products fit the application, which system-integrator or OEM relationships remain necessary, and where the deployment model creates unacceptable dependency.
- Define the technical boundaries, evidence gates, acceptance criteria, risk allocation, and monitoring required for a paid or financed proof of concept.
- Support supplier comparison, clarification, shortlisting, and award when an emerging company is proposed for a material part of the end customer's automation spend.
- Follow the product through pilot, acceptance, and rollout so that field outcomes improve future qualification decisions.
- Preserve independent judgment throughout the commercial process. Qualification earns a company consideration for the right work package; the end customer retains selection and award authority.
- 07
Build the evidence and monitoring system
- Define the ontology, structured fields, evidence lineage, scorecards, and benchmarks required to compare startups without flattening meaningful technical differences.
- Build a versioned record of product generations, deployments, acceptance outcomes, field failures, service events, organizational changes, and customer concentration.
- Establish monitoring and requalification triggers for material product changes, founder departures, certification events, safety incidents, quality escapes, funding stress, or service deterioration.
- Work with Data and Engineering to turn field workflows into reliable systems while preserving the source evidence behind each conclusion.
- Use AI tooling to accelerate document review, evidence extraction, comparison, and report production without delegating technical judgment.
- Create proprietary intelligence on which startup signals actually predict successful deployment.
- 08
Build the team and operating model
- Recruit and develop technical qualification engineers with direct robotics, controls, integration, commissioning, product, and field-service judgment.
- Build a qualified specialist network for safety, cybersecurity, certification, software, manufacturing quality, and domain-specific applications.
- Define which work requires direct Cenotian judgment and which can be completed by trained partners.
- Establish review, calibration, conflict, confidentiality, and audit standards across internal and partner-delivered qualifications.
- Own service capacity, scheduling, utilization, delivery cost, gross margin, and quality.
- Make the second qualification faster and more consistent because the method improved, without turning the work into a superficial checklist.
You'll know it's working when
Qualification conclusions change real admission, sourcing, financing, pilot, and deployment decisions.
Strong technology with weak delivery infrastructure receives precise conditions and a prioritized improvement plan rather than unearned approval.
Demo-stage products, unproved reliability, founder dependencies, and service gaps surface before an enterprise customer carries the risk.
Recommendations improve bills of materials, supply resilience, manufacturing flow, deployment design, and service readiness in ways that can be verified.
Qualified companies shorten the path from product readiness to accepted deployment while reducing working-capital intensity, avoidable capex, delivered cost, and lifetime service burden.
Emerging robotics companies enter matched work packages, paid proofs of concept, and rollout programs faster because the technical diligence and readiness work are already complete.
Enterprise clients can direct large automation budgets toward emerging suppliers without carrying invisible product, manufacturing, integration, or continuity risk.
Enterprise buyers and system integrators trust the Cenotian conclusion even when it is negative.
The Cenotian Validated designation becomes difficult enough to matter and valuable enough that strong startups seek it out.
Live deployment outcomes improve the method, scorecards, and future qualification speed.
Qualification revenue, gross margin, turnaround time, and quality become predictable.
The practice scales through a calibrated team and specialist network without losing direct technical judgment.
Candidate profile
What we require
- A robotics operator who can inspect the machine, read the company behind it, challenge a founder, and build an institution around the resulting judgment.
- 5 years across either (i) robotics, industrial automation, advanced manufacturing, complex hardware, system integration, technical product leadership, deployment, or technical diligence and/or (ii) high-growth manufacturing-related startup or venture investing.
- Direct responsibility for commercial robotics products that reached live customer environments.
- Strong judgment across controls, software, mechanical systems, safety, integration, commissioning, acceptance, reliability, manufacturing, and service.
- Experience distinguishing prototype success from repeatable product and deployment readiness.
- Ability to evaluate capabilities, team composition, organizational dependencies, and operating discipline without substituting charisma for evidence.
- Commercial credibility with founders, enterprise buyers, system integrators, investors, and technical leaders.
- A record of making consequential go, conditional, or stop decisions and defending them with evidence.
- Professional English and the ability to communicate precisely across deeply technical engineers, founders, and executives, without diluting the salient technical findings.
Personal standard
- Energized by laboratories, workshops, customer sites, and the unglamorous evidence behind reliable hardware.
- Curious enough to investigate the complete delivery system rather than stop at the machine demonstration.
- Direct enough to tell an exceptional founder that the product is not ready.
- Immune to famous investors, impressive fundraising, polished decks, and strategic excitement when the field evidence is weak. This role is about translating technical reality into qualification and standards - not about narratives.
- Constructive with teams that expose problems honestly and impatient with unsupported certainty.
- Disciplined about traceability, comparability, confidentiality, and conflicts.
- High stamina for substantial international travel and founder-intensive work.
Background paths
01End-to-end product leader of a hyper-growth robotics platform/system
You were the senior product leader inside a high-growth robotics company. Your authority extended far beyond the roadmap. You owned the physical product from architecture and supplier choices through industrialization, release, customer deployment, acceptance, field reliability, and service.
You connected engineering, supply chain, manufacturing, quality, applications, and deployment around one product truth. You knew what could ship, what still required founder supervision, which failures were normal, and which ones revealed that the product or company was not ready. When supply pressure, customer commitments, and engineering reality collided, you made the decision.
You built the gates, evidence, and operating routines that replaced heroics with repeatable delivery. A software product role, product-marketing role, roadmap-only seat, or responsibility for one isolated subsystem does not fit. Your decisions must have reached the bill of materials, the factory, the customer site, and the field data that came back afterwards.
02Robotics founder who cracked manufacturing
You founded or technically led a robotics company and crossed the point most robotics startups never reach: the product stopped being a prototype and became something the company could manufacture repeatedly.
You owned the decisions behind suppliers, tooling, product configuration, production testing, certification, quality, cost, warranty, and field failure. Customers operated the product without your engineers permanently standing beside it. When components failed, schedules slipped, or early designs met the factory, the consequences belonged to you.
A celebrated demonstration, a large financing round, or several founder-supported pilots do not meet the bar. You built a controlled manufacturing and delivery system, produced multiple units or systems through it, and can show that the resulting products survived commercial deployment.
03Robotics engineer who became a venture investor
You began as a robotics engineer and later became an investor in robotics, industrial technology, or complex hardware. Founders respected you because you understood the machine. Investment committees trusted you because you could read the company around it.
You have evaluated many more robotics businesses than any single operator will ever build. You know how technical risk hides inside product claims, founder dependency, manufacturing plans, customer pilots, unit economics, and the next financing round. You have backed unfamiliar technology when the evidence held and declined celebrated companies when it did not.
Credible technical pedigree means:
Before venture, you held a substantive engineering role in robotics, mechatronics, controls, perception, embedded systems, industrial automation, manufacturing engineering, or an adjacent physical-systems discipline.
You personally designed, built, tested, integrated, industrialized, or deployed a physical system. Your work reached hardware, a production environment, or a customer site rather than ending in research, simulation, or technical strategy.
You owned meaningful engineering outcomes through failure and correction. You can explain what broke, how the evidence changed your view, and what had to change in the product or delivery system.
After entering venture, you continued to lead technical diligence yourself. You inspected products, challenged architecture and maturity claims, spoke with customers and technical references, and followed portfolio companies through manufacturing or deployment problems.
You can move from a technical finding to its implications for team design, capital requirements, commercial commitments, unit economics, and company survival.
A robotics degree, PhD, brief engineering placement, or technical-investing brand does not establish this pedigree. You must have carried real engineering responsibility before venture and retained enough technical depth afterwards that a strong robotics CTO still has to prepare for your questions.
Organizational context
The Head of Technical Qualification, Emerging Robotics will work most closely with:
- CEO / Co-founder.
- Technical Qualification Engineers and specialist partners - conduct field assessments, evidence review, domain diligence, and monitoring under the Head's standard.
- Special Missions Group - prototype new qualification, telemetry, simulation, continuity, and deployment propositions before permanent adoption.
- CFO / Head of Finance and Underwriting - use qualification evidence in transaction conditions, approval, monitoring, and exposure decisions.
- Head of Commercial / CCO - startup, system-integrator, OEM, operator, and investor relationships; market entry; and paid service development.
- Enterprise Value Engineering - use qualified products and suppliers within work-package design, sourcing, proof-of-concept, and rollout programs.
- VP, Data and Head of Engineering - ontology, evidence lineage, scorecards, workflow systems, monitoring, and data-quality standards.
- Compliance, safety, and cybersecurity specialists - provide independent domain judgment where the qualification requires regulated or specialist evidence.
- The Head owns the startup qualification method, service economics, client conclusion, delivery quality, team, partner network, and the Cenotian Validated standard. Final financing authority remains with Finance and the Investment Committee. Startup-program admission remains with its governing decision makers. Safety certification, conformity assessment, and regulatory approval remain with qualified external authorities.
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