---
title: 'Founding Product Manager at Ultra'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-product-manager-ultra-brooklyn-4tb57rm0cymn'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Founding Product Manager at Ultra

- **Company:** Ultra
- **Location:** Brooklyn, NY
- **Compensation:** $185k–$230k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/ultra/am9icG9zdDrMyLhzs59vqC98XMfyDWhV

## Job description

## About the Role

As our first product hire, you'll own the customer experience end to end and set the roadmap for Ultra's software ecosystem. Our robots are half of what we sell; the software our customers live in is the other half. A warehouse associate uses it to start and monitor a job. A site supervisor uses it to see what ran, what faulted, and what it cost. An operations director compares last week to this week across facilities. A CEO uses it to decide whether to sign for fifty more robots. Four very different users, four different definitions of "working," and all of them have to trust the same system.

This is a horizontal role. You'll work across hardware and software engineering, autonomy, deployments, operations, sales, and leadership. You'll spend real time on warehouse floors with the people who use our robots and bring what you learn back into what we ship. You're expected to build, not just specify - conceptualize, design, prototype, and hand engineering something concrete.

You'll also define what product means at Ultra: what a spec is, how we prioritize, how we decide something is done. We're going from tens of robots to hundreds and then thousands over the next few years. The platform that makes that sticky is yours to build.

Location: This is a on-site role based in New York City, with frequent travel.

## What You’ll Do

- Own the roadmap: Decide what we build for customers and in what order, and defend those decisions with evidence rather than opinion.
- Be the voice of the customer: Embed on-site with associates, supervisors, and operators. Watch how our robots and software actually get used, then make sure what you learn is incorporated in what we ship.
- Design and prototype: Go from problem to working interface yourself. Design it, build it in Cursor or Claude Code, put it in-front of a customer, and iterate.
- Ship with engineering: Work directly with our software team to go from prototype to production. Make priorities and the reasoning behind them obvious to the people building.
- Own the hardware/software seam: Latency, faults, teleop handoffs, safety states, and what happens when a robot drops something are product problems, not just engineering ones.
- Serve every user type: Build one platform that works for a warehouse associate at 2am and an executive reviewing spend at quarter end.
- Support GTM: Join customer calls, demos, and pilots. Help sales and leadership translate what we're building into why it matters.
- Communicate externally: Write and speak clearly about what we're building - to customers, partners, and the world.

## Who You Are

- A builder: You'd rather show a working prototype than write a document about one. You have design taste and can produce yourself.
- An AI power user: Cursor, Claude Code, whatever is fastest this month. These are daily tools for you.
- Credible with engineers: You can hold a room, make priorities and the reasoning behind them clear, and do it with real empathy for how product actually gets built.
- Technically literate: You don't need to write production code, but you can understand how our autonomy stack, software stack, and robots work, and why certain things are hard.
- A strong communicator: You can explain a technical idea to a CTO, a skeptical warehouse manager, and a room of investors in the same day.
- Bonus: You're a former founder

## Experience and Skills

- 5-10+ years shipping great software products.
- Experience with hardware or hardware-adjacent products - robotics, devices, industrial, medical, automotive, or logistics. Our software is tightly coupled to a physical machine.
- Fluency with agile product development and working day to day with engineering teams.
- Comfortable analyzing product and operational data to decide what to build next.

## About Ultra

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Ultra builds practical, general-purpose industrial AI robots that automate repetitive warehouse tasks like packing, sorting, and kitting, with zero integration and rapid deployment.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; $625K total funding)
- **Headquarters**: New York, NY, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Jon Miller Schwartz (CEO), Max Friefeld (COO), Chetan Parthiban (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist), Oliver Ortlieb (Co-Founder & CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics Engineering / Industrial Automation
- **Target customers**: B2B – warehouses, fulfillment centers, and logistics operators (enterprise and SMB)
- **Mission or purpose**: To deploy practical, general-purpose robots that generate immediate ROI by handling repetitive, high‑volume work, and to scale intelligence through real‑world data.

## Products & Services
- **[Operator](https://www.ultra.tech/)**: A stationary industrial AI robot designed for e‑commerce order packaging, sorting, and kitting. It operates up to 24 hours a day, requires no fixed infrastructure, installs in hours, and covers a 5×5 ft footprint with a 10 ft vertical reach. The robot learns new tasks from example data and improves fleet‑wide as more units are deployed.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $625K (Seed: $125K in Aug 2024; Pre‑Seed: $500K in Sep 2024 led by Y Combinator)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (lead investor), three additional investors in Pre‑Seed round
- **Growth Signals**: 14 total employees (as of early 2025), 19 employees (latest) – **333% YoY headcount growth**; robots already deployed in real warehouses generating revenue and data; launched the Operator robot in April 2026 with 184 LinkedIn reactions; actively hiring across engineering, research, deployment, and people operations.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Zero‑integration deployment**: Robots can be rolled in, plugged in, and turned on within hours – no expensive infrastructure or lengthy integration.
- **Stationary, safe design**: No tipping risk, no battery swaps, no charging breaks – designed for continuous operation in real warehouse conditions.
- **AI trained with examples**: Uses neural nets trained on teleoperation data (≈2 hours) to learn new tasks, enabling rapid adaptation to variable items and changing workflows.
- **Fleet learning**: Every deployed robot feeds data back to improve the entire fleet – a data‑scale moat that compounds with more deployments.

## Strategic Focus
- Rapidly scale deployments across the US in 2025‑2026, building on proven field traction.
- Continue improving robot foundation models for faster, more robust task learning and execution.
- Expand from e‑commerce packaging into adjacent warehouse workflows (e.g., kitting, returns).
- Grow the team (targeting engineering, research, deployment, and people functions) to support production scaling.

## Why Work Here
- **Early‑stage impact**: Join a YC‑backed startup founded by three‑time entrepreneurs (previously founded Layer By Layer, Voodoo Manufacturing) with a decade of collaboration.
- **Fast‑paced, hands‑on culture**: Engineers and researchers directly own firmware, hardware, ML models, and deployment – from design to field support.
- **Real‑world robotics**: Work on robots that are already generating revenue in customer warehouses, not just lab prototypes.
- **Growth trajectory**: 333% headcount growth in the past year, with ambitious plans to scale from 19 to hundreds of employees.
- **Location & flexibility**: Based in New York City; roles span HQ (assembly, testing, R&D) and field deployment across the US.
- **Open roles** (as of early 2026): Robotics Firmware Engineer, Robotics Hardware Engineer, Data Operations Lead, Research Scientist, Product Engineer, Deployment Engineer, Head of People – offering broad ownership and career growth.

## Sources
1. [ultra.tech](https://www.ultra.tech/)
2. [Y Combinator – Ultra](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ultra)
3. [Built In – Ultra Company Profile](https://builtin.com/company/ultra-ultra-tech)
4. [Built In – Ultra Jobs](https://builtin.com/company/ultra-ultra-tech/jobs)
5. [LinkedIn – Ultra](https://www.linkedin.com/company/ultraroboticsco)

## Other roles at Ultra

- [Senior Software Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-infrastructure-engineer-ultra-brooklyn-cag4a9js5h01) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/product-engineer-ultra-brooklyn-292bdydcv44s) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Research Scientist / Research Engineer (Intern)](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-research-engineer-intern-ultra-brooklyn-0t1bvtfpqw94) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Head of Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-marketing-ultra-brooklyn-rarz21rtmbav) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Head of Customer Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-customer-operations-ultra-brooklyn-yjsm4ykqs5f5) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Data Operations Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/data-operations-associate-ultra-brooklyn-fwe9qb9nk4xe) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Head of People](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-people-ultra-brooklyn-g8frrbpfpq6d) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Head of Finance](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-finance-ultra-brooklyn-rtaykzbf200b) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Robotics Firmware Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/robotics-firmware-engineer-ultra-brooklyn-vsb5dh914ger) — Brooklyn, NY
- [Supply Chain and Procurement Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/supply-chain-and-procurement-lead-ultra-brooklyn-p1brfk2ye8wc) — Brooklyn, NY