---
title: 'Head of People at Eka'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-people-eka-boston-3fr4xvy9q6zv'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-20'
---

# Head of People at Eka

- **Company:** Eka
- **Location:** Boston, MA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-15
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-20
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ekarobotics/6801e7f3-6d44-4767-a678-d4b5747fa2be

## Job description

Eka Robotics We are looking for a Head of People to build and lead the People function at Eka. You will work closely with our leadership team on the people and organizational questions that become increasingly important as Eka grows: how we structure teams, compensate and reward employees, develop new managers, maintain a strong culture, and build People systems that support our employees without creating unnecessary bureaucracy (e.g., revamping our hiring process to reduce burden on teams, improving new-joiner onboarding, formalizing performance management and feedback right sized to the organization, etc.). We are looking for someone with broad HR experience who has seen this stage of company-building before and experienced first hand what happens as early stage startups scale, when complexities increase and informal practices are no longer enough. This is a highly hands-on role. You will help set the direction and build the function, but you should also be comfortable personally doing the work.

## Role Overview

- Partner with our leadership team on organizational design, headcount planning, and how our teams should evolve as we scale.
- Refine our compensation, leveling, and rewards philosophy, including salary structures, bonuses, equity grants, and refresh programs
- Build practical approaches to performance, career development, manager training, and employee growth.
- Help define and strengthen Eka’s culture and employee experience as the company grows.
- Own the day-to-day People function, including HR policies and processes, benefits, payroll, compliance, employee relations, and employee support, working with external partners where appropriate.
- Build lightweight, scalable People systems and work closely with our talent team to ensure recruiting and People strategy stay aligned.
- Develop manager training and support, particularly for first-time managers and technical leaders
- Advise leadership on employee relations, retention, organizational effectiveness, and other complex People matters.

## Minimum Qualifications

- Broad experience across the People function, including People operations and employment/compliance fundamentals as well as areas such as compensation, performance management, organizational design, and manager development.
- Firsthand experience at a fast-growing startup, ideally having helped the organization scale through a meaningful stage of growth and change.
- Experience building or materially improving People programs and processes rather than only operating within established systems.
- Strong working knowledge of compensation and equity in a venture-backed company, including the ability to help leadership develop a coherent philosophy around how employees are rewarded.
- Experience advising leadership on organizational and employee matters while remaining comfortable working directly with employees and handling day-to-day issues.
- Strong judgment and communication skills, particularly when navigating sensitive or ambiguous situations.
- A hands-on, low-ego operating style and the judgment to know when a growing company needs more structure — and when it doesn’t.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience in robotics, AI, deep technology, or another highly technical environment.
- Experience helping technical ICs transition into first time management roles.
- Experience supporting international or geographic expansion.
- Experience working with a PEO or similarly outsourced HR infrastructure.

## About Eka

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Eka Robotics is building general-purpose, dexterous robots that master physics through self-supervised learning and a novel Vision-Force-Action (VFA) model, aiming to deploy safe, collaborative intelligence into the physical world.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Startup, Pre-Seed / Angel-backed)
- **Headquarters**: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Pulkit Agrawal and Tuomas Haarnoja

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Robotics Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Hardware, Automation
- **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise (logistics, manufacturing, material handling)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To build intelligence for the physical world in its native language: force, creating robots that master physics, collaborate safely with humans, and generalize across objects, tasks, and environments.

## Products & Services
- **Vision-Force-Action (VFA) Model**: A new AI foundation model that unites generality, performance, and safety. It allows robots to perceive the world visually, interact with it through force (the "native language" of physics), and execute actions. This model is designed to overcome the traditional trade-off between generality and performance in robotics.
- **Dexterous Robotic Manipulation Platform**: A hardware and software platform for dexterous, collaborative robots. The platform is designed to be safe around humans, environment-agnostic, and capable of mastering the unexpected through a single model that generalizes across objects, tasks, and environments.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available (Pre-Seed / Angel-backed startup).
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding: Not publicly available (described as "angel-backed" with no known external funding rounds disclosed).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Angel-backed; specific investors not publicly disclosed. The founding team has deep ties to MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, DeepMind, Microsoft, and Boston Dynamics.
- **Growth Signals**: Extremely early stage (founded in 2025). Despite this, the company has a very high growth trajectory in terms of hiring and web presence. LinkedIn reports 6 employees with +300% monthly growth, and 11 active job postings. Website traffic is growing +254.5% monthly.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Founding Team & Research Pedigree**: Co-founded by Pulkit Agrawal (MIT professor, leader of the Improbable AI Lab, 2024 IEEE Early Academic Career Award) and Tuomas Haarnoja (ex-DeepMind). The team includes talent from MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, CMU, DeepMind, Microsoft, and Boston Dynamics.
- **Novel Technical Approach (VFA Model)**: Their core technology, the Vision-Force-Action (VFA) model, is a claimed breakthrough that unites generality (a single model for many tasks), performance (speed and reliability), and safety (force-based interaction). This is a significant differentiator in the robotics space, which often forces a trade-off between these three attributes.
- **Self-Supervised Learning & Sim-to-Real**: The company pioneers self-supervised learning and sim-to-real reinforcement learning, enabling robots to develop "common sense" and physical intuition automatically without massive amounts of human-labeled data.
- **World-Class Talent Magnet**: Despite being a very early-stage startup, they are attracting top-tier talent from leading tech companies and research labs, indicating a strong technical vision and culture.

## Strategic Focus
- **Productization & Deployment**: The company is actively hiring for roles across engineering, hardware, and operations, signaling a strong push to move from research to a deployable product.
- **Scaling the Team**: With 11 open positions for a company of ~6 employees, the immediate strategic focus is on aggressive team building across all functions (ML, hardware, software, operations).
- **Building the Foundation**: Current priorities include developing the core VFA model, building the physical robotic platform, creating robust simulation environments, and establishing operational processes for scaling.

## Why Work Here
- **Cutting-Edge Mission**: Work on the frontier of embodied AI and robotics, tackling the fundamental challenge of building machines that can interact with the physical world.
- **World-Class Team**: Join a team of experts from top-tier institutions (MIT, Berkeley, DeepMind, Boston Dynamics) and work alongside leaders in the field.
- **High Impact, Early Stage**: As one of the first ~20 employees, you will have an outsized impact on the company's technology, culture, and direction.
- **In-Office Culture**: All roles are based in Boston, MA, and are in-office, fostering close collaboration on complex hardware and software problems.
- **Diverse, High-Caliber Roles**: Openings span from ML/RL engineering and simulation to mechanical design, embedded systems, and business operations, offering a wide range of challenging work.

## Sources
1. [ekarobotics.com](https://ekarobotics.com/)
2. [LinkedIn - Eka Robotics](https://www.linkedin.com/company/eka-robotics)
3. [Dealroom.co - Eka Robotics](https://app.dealroom.co/companies/eka_robotics)
4. [Built In - Eka Robotics Jobs](https://builtin.com/company/eka-robotics/jobs)
5. [Ashby - Eka Robotics Careers](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ekarobotics)

## Other roles at Eka

- [Senior/Staff/Principal Hardware Test Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-principal-hardware-test-engineer-eka-boston-1dnra1c94rk4) — Boston, MA
- [Senior Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-recruiter-eka-boston-wn4ge9ca185n) — Boston, MA
- [Developer Productivity Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/developer-productivity-engineer-eka-boston-sct07sehhmy2) — Boston, MA
- [Forward Deployed Robotics Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-robotics-engineer-eka-boston-jxtqzxkdmf77) — Boston, MA
- [Robotics Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/robotics-software-engineer-eka-boston-5fb4fftf57eg) — Boston, MA
- [Research Engineer – Simulation](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-simulation-eka-boston-jtmvybfdvqmn) — Boston, MA
- [Machine Learning / Computer Vision Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-computer-vision-engineer-eka-boston-f2z8zq36n5vv) — Boston, MA
- [Senior/Staff/Principal Mechanical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-principal-mechanical-engineer-eka-boston-gm2bz9qr8geb) — Boston, MA
- [Machine Learning / Reinforcement Learning Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-reinforcement-learning-infrastructure-engineer-eka-boston-czmmjx0d7nk3) — Boston, MA
- [Machine Learning / Reinforcement Learning Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-reinforcement-learning-engineer-eka-boston-as8ph30n88pz) — Boston, MA