--- title: 'Head of Customer Operations at Ultra' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-customer-operations-ultra-brooklyn-yjsm4ykqs5f5' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-05' --- # Head of Customer Operations at Ultra - **Company:** Ultra - **Location:** Brooklyn, NY - **Compensation:** $175k–$300k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-08-05 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05 - **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/ultra/am9icG9zdDpPXd0pBA19gNq8FcUcNUF1 ## Job description We are looking for a Head of Customer Operations to own everything that happens after a customer signs. You will inherit Ultra's ~10 person post-sale organization — field deployment, support, and customer success — and build it to match our quickly growing customer base. The role is both operational and strategic: you'll own deployment process as well as retention performance. You do not need to be a technical expert, but you do need to know how to build and lead a team of deployment and support experts while maintaining a culture of excellence that obsesses over the customer experience. ## What you'll own Customer trust and retention - Own gross retention across SMB and Enterprise accounts; know every customer's economics, risk profile and have a scalable process for tracking their metrics. - Read sentiment early — act before, not after, a customer is considering contract renewal or expansion - Understand how to build trust with reliable, consistent communication and performance. - Run a regular cadence of business reviews with our customers to ensure we are meeting their goals. Post-sale deployment - Take full ownership of the deployment from planning to delivery. - Drive down cost-to-serve through scalable tooling and processes. - Own performance of our remote teleoperation team and manage their impact on our customer experience. Fleet performance - Know how every robot in the fleet is performing relative to KPIs, and hold the org to that standard. - Use qualitative as well as intervention and fault data to bring the voice of our customers to the hardware and software teams. - Anticipate where the service model breaks at scale, and fix it before it breaks. Building the team - Own the hiring plan; define roles, scorecards, and ramp plans. Run the interview loops yourself. - Invest in and train your team to consistently surprise and delight our customers. ## What we're looking for - 7+ years across customer-facing and operational roles - Evidence of strategic ownership, not just execution: you've reshaped a service model, restructured an at-risk project, and made the difficult calls needed to protect long-term relationships - Recent hands-on experience in a directly relevant field, you've personally owned accounts and run deployments in the last three years. - Experience with hardware products and services — robotics, automation, industrial equipment, logistics, or field-deployed hardware. - Enterprise credibility: you've sat across from a Fortune 500 operations or procurement leaders and held your ground. - Willingness to travel up to 25% of the time to customer sites. Helpful: warehouse fulfillment or 3PL domain experience; WMS/WES integration and enterprise IT review cycles; standing up a customer success or field service tool stack. Probably not a fit if: your last two roles were purely managerial and you want to stay there; your product experience is entirely software with no hardware; you need mature process and clean data to operate; travel is a dealbreaker. ## 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 - [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 - [Founding Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-product-manager-ultra-brooklyn-4tb57rm0cymn) — 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