---
title: 'Deployment & Engagement Operations Lead at Physical Intelligence'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/deployment-engagement-operations-lead-physical-intelligence-san-francisco-rm51qjgc5bnt'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-08'
---

# Deployment & Engagement Operations Lead at Physical Intelligence

- **Company:** Physical Intelligence
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-11-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/physicalintelligence/a7bfa681-3e71-42af-b72f-a9ec144434c6

## Job description

## Who We Are

Physical Intelligence is bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world. We are a group of engineers, scientists, roboticists, and company builders developing foundation models and learning algorithms to power the robots of today and the physically-actuated devices of the future. The Team This role sits in Research Operations and works closely with partnerships, research, hardware, and infrastructure. Partnerships sets the terms of each engagement and research owns the technical goal. This role owns everything it takes to deliver operationally, from the point an agreement takes shape through completion. This role requires sound judgment, comfort with ambiguity, and a strong sense of ownership. You will start as a hands-on individual contributor, build the playbook for how PI runs external engagements, and grow the team that supports future partners and deployments.

## About the Role

As our work scales, more of it happens alongside external partners and at deployment sites. Each engagement brings its own site, schedule, stakeholders, and constraints. The Deployment & Engagement Operations Lead makes sure these engagements are scoped, staffed, resourced, and delivered successfully, so research and engineering teams can stay focused on the technical work. In This Role You Will

- Own operational scope, resourcing, and execution for external engagements and deployments, from kickoff through completion.
- Translate partner commitments into execution plans that define milestones, owners, staffing, robot allocation, and site requirements.
- Lead complex, long-running engagements involving multiple teams, evolving requirements, and significant operational responsibility.
- Build trusted relationships with partner stakeholders and work through their requirements, approvals, schedules, and site constraints.
- Stand up new sites, bringing together operators, fleet support, equipment, logistics, and site access.
- Plan staffing and coverage across robots, shifts, and locations, and step in directly on site when needed.
- Drive readiness ahead of key milestones, including dry runs, bring-up checks, inventory, and fleet and infrastructure coverage.
- Prioritize and allocate robots, people, and support across concurrent engagements, and flag when a commitment needs to change.
- Keep partners, researchers, and leadership aligned on status, risks, escalations, and decisions.
- Build repeatable playbooks and processes, and grow the team that carries them forward as the work scales.

## What We Hope You'll Bring

This role sits at the intersection of program management, field operations, and partner delivery. We're looking for someone who has owned operational outcomes on the ground, can lead several engagements at once, and can step into whichever one needs attention.

- 5+ years of experience in program management, field operations, technical project management, or similar roles.
- Track record of launching and running physical operations, such as opening new sites, markets, or facilities, leading hardware deployments, or running on-site programs for enterprise customers.
- Experience owning delivery of external partners or customer programs end to end.
- Experience staffing and leading teams across shifts and locations.
- Ability to quickly understand technical goals and work through tradeoffs with researchers, engineers, and external partners.
- Strong judgment under pressure, including knowing when to escalate and when to push back on commitments we cannot keep.
- Willingness to travel frequently and work extended stretches on site.

Bonus Points

- Experience supporting AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles, or hardware organizations.
- Experience working within large enterprise partner environments, including confidentiality, approvals, and site access requirements.
- Experience turning one-off launches into a repeatable operating motion.
- Experience building operational processes and scaling teams.
- Familiarity with robotics workflows and teleoperation environments.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

## About Physical Intelligence

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Physical Intelligence is building general-purpose AI foundation models that can control any robot to perform any physical task, aiming to bring the flexibility of large language models into the physical world.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A/B stage; total funding $1.07B across multiple rounds)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Sergey Levine (UC Berkeley), Chelsea Finn (Stanford), Karol Hausman (CEO, ex-Google DeepMind), Lachy Groom (ex-Stripe), Quan Vuong (ex-Google DeepMind), Brian Ichter, and Adnan Esmail

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics foundation models / Artificial Intelligence / Research Services
- **Target customers**: B2B enterprise – logistics, grocery, manufacturing, and other verticals requiring physical automation (currently testing with a small number of partners)
- **Mission**: “Bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world” – developing learning algorithms and foundation models to power robots and other physically-actuated devices

## Products & Services
- **π0 (pi-zero)**: First generalist policy released in October 2024; a vision-language-action (VLA) model capable of dexterous multi-task robot control. Open-sourced in February 2025.
- **π0.5**: VLA with open-world generalization (April 2025); can control a mobile manipulator to clean unfamiliar kitchens or bedrooms.
- **π0.7**: Steerable robotic foundation model with emergent capabilities (April 2026); can control a new robot platform without additional training.
- **π*0.6**: VLA trained with reinforcement learning to improve success rate and throughput on real-world tasks (November 2025).
- **FAST**: Efficient robot action tokenizer enabling 5x faster training of generalist policies (January 2025).
- **Multi-Scale Embodied Memory (MEM)**: Gives models long- and short-term memory for tasks exceeding ten minutes (March 2026).
- All offerings are research-stage models; the company does not currently sell a commercial product but partners with select companies for testing.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: $5.6 billion (as of January 2026, per TechCrunch)
- **Total Funding**: $1.07 billion across four rounds:
  - Seed (March 2024): $70M led by Lux Capital and Thrive Capital
  - Series A (November 2024): $400M led by Lux Capital and Thrive Capital
  - Venture Round (November 2025): $600M from 8 investors
  - Venture Round (March 2026): undisclosed amount from 4 investors
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, OpenAI, CapitalG, Redpoint Ventures, Bond
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 183.5% year-over-year to 163 employees (LinkedIn, mid-2026); the company states it has “blown through” its original 5-10 year roadmap in just 18 months; test deployments in logistics, grocery, and food production.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Cross-embodiment learning**: Models can transfer knowledge to any new robot hardware without starting data collection from scratch, lowering the marginal cost of onboarding autonomy.
- **Pure research focus**: Unlike competitors (e.g., Skild AI), Physical Intelligence deliberately avoids near-term commercialization, allowing the team to pursue general intelligence without product pressure.
- **World-class founding team**: Combination of top robotics academics (Levine, Finn) and experienced entrepreneurs/operators (Groom, Hausman).
- **Open-source release**: π0 weights and code are publicly available, fostering community contributions and accelerating research.

## Strategic Focus
- Current priorities include scaling foundation models to more tasks and environments, improving generalization and robustness, and expanding partnerships for real-world testing.
- The company explicitly does not give investors a timeline for monetization; instead it focuses on building general-purpose physical intelligence with a 5-10 year horizon (though progress has been faster than expected).
- Future strategy centers on continuous improvement via a loop of data collection → training → evaluation → more data, rather than rapid deployment.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as a “pure company” – internally driven by research needs, not external market demands. Highly collaborative, with a mix of engineers, scientists, and roboticists working together.
- **Work Environment**: Hybrid/in-office – most roles require on-site presence in San Francisco (396 Treat Ave), though some remote flexibility exists. In-office setting with a “no reception” vibe, open lab space with robot stations.
- **Growth**: Team has scaled from ~80 (Jan 2026) to 163 (mid-2026) and is still hiring across research, ML infra, hardware, and engineering roles. Plans to grow “as slowly as possible” to maintain quality.
- **Perks & Engineering Highlights**: Access to cutting-edge robotics hardware and compute resources; opportunity to publish research and open-source code; exposure to a wide variety of real-world automation challenges (e.g., robots learning to fold pants, peel vegetables, make espresso). Employees come from top institutions like Berkeley, Stanford, Google, NVIDIA, and Anduril.

## Sources
1. [physicalintelligence.company](https://www.physicalintelligence.company/) – Official website, model releases, and values
2. [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/30/physical-intelligence-stripe-veteran-lachy-grooms-latest-bet-is-building-silicon-valleys-buzziest-robot-brains/) – In-depth profile including valuation, strategy, and culture
3. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/physical-intelligence) – Company details, headcount, funding, and talent sources
4. [Built In](https://builtin.com/company/physical-intelligence) – Career page, employee count, and office policy
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/physicalintelligence](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/physicalintelligence) – Current job openings

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