Sr Business Development & Ops Lead, Robotics & Physical AI
World Labs
- Location
- San Francisco
- Work model
- On-Site
- Level
- Senior
- Posted
- 1h ago
About this role
About World Labs
World Labs is a frontier AI research and product company advancing spatial and physical intelligence. We build world models that perceive, generate, reason, and interact with virtual and physical worlds - transforming seeing into doing, perceiving into reasoning, and imagining into creating.
Our vision is to empower and augment humanity through science and technology: building models, products, and business solutions that expand what people can do, and how well they can live and work.
When spatial intelligence becomes physical, the north star goal is to advance the field of robotics. Many laboratory demonstrations of robots today show promising progress, but the real challenge is making them work reliably in the real world, where objects shift, clutter accumulates, lighting changes, and physical interactions vary from one trial to the next. This gap between a compelling demo and reliable operation is a major barrier to putting robotic systems to work at scale. SceniX, a robotics and simulation company, has joined World Labs.
The Role
We are looking for a Sr Business Development and Operations Lead to help shape how World Labs brings its robotics technology to market.
This is a highly technical, hands-on business development role at the intersection of Physical AI, simulation, spatial intelligence and enterprise customers. You will be part of our world-class teams partnering closely with research and engineering groups to understand what our technology can do today, where it is heading, and where it can create meaningful value for robotics teams in the real world.
You will own the full lifecycle of strategic and operational customer engagements: from identifying the right problems and shaping the solution to building the commercial relationship and closing the deal.
What You Will Do
Market + Technical Understanding
• Develop a deep understanding of our robotics technology, its capabilities and limitations, and how the broader robotics and Physical AI ecosystem is evolving.
• Identify the customers, use cases, and problems where our technology can create differentiated value, and develop a strong point of view on where the market is heading.
Customer Discovery + Feedback Loop
• Spend meaningful time with customers to understand their workflows, technical constraints, deployment environments, and unmet needs firsthand.
• Build a tight feedback loop between customers and the team: translate problems back to research and engineering, synthesize patterns, and help distinguish scalable product opportunities from one-off customization.
Commercialization + Closing
• Shape and execute early customer engagements, pilots, and partnerships in close collaboration with research, engineering, and product teams.
• Own strategic opportunities end to end: from prospecting and discovery through technical evaluation, commercial structure, negotiation, contracting, and close.
Operating + Building the Function
• Build the operational foundation for an early commercial function: maintain customer and opportunity pipelines, establish lightweight processes, drive follow-through, unblock dependencies, and make sure commitments get delivered.
What We Are Looking For
• 8+ years of experience in related industries.
• Deep experience in robotics, Physical AI, autonomous systems, simulation, or an adjacent frontier technology, with firsthand exposure to customers, products, or deployments.
• Technical fluency to engage credibly with