---
title: 'Shift Lead (Data Collection) at Mimic Robotics'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/shift-lead-data-collection-mimic-robotics-zurich-xwtv9jewhp20'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-21'
---

# Shift Lead (Data Collection) at Mimic Robotics

- **Company:** Mimic Robotics
- **Location:** Zurich, Switzerland
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-21
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/mimicrobotics-com/am9icG9zdDpNWR4xFXK2oScmwm-Po-Nv

## Job description

mimic robotics is a frontier physical AI company building the full stack of general-purpose dexterous manipulation. Founded in 2024 by ETH Zurich researchers, mimic pioneered Video-Action Models for robotics while also developing in-house dexterous hand hardware. Our growing team brings together world-class researchers working across our offices in Zurich and San Francisco.

We are looking for a highly organized, energetic, and hands-on Shift Lead to own the day-to-day operations of our Product data collection team. You'll make sure our Data Collectors are supported, shifts run smoothly, and our stations operate efficiently as we rapidly scale our data collection efforts. Get an impression of the Data Collector team's role [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ3tRQ1YE-8) and [Here](https://www.mimicrobotics.com/blog/solving-dexterity-a-full-stack-approach)

## Responsibilities

- Lead day-to-day shifts, assign tasks, and unblock the team.
- Hire, onboard, train, and support Data Collectors.
- Build shift plans and ensure high utilization of our data collection stations.
- Own operational KPIs including throughput, efficiency, and station utilization.
- Create and prepare new data collection tasks in collaboration with AI and Robotics teams.
- Ensure equipment and stations are available and functioning.
- Identify bottlenecks and improve internal tooling, workflows, and processes.
- Support the setup of new collection spaces and environments.
- Act as the operational point of contact between Data Collection and AI/Robotics teams.

## What we're looking for

- Highly organized, proactive, and energetic.
- Strong people skills and confidence leading teams day-to-day.
- Experience in operations, shift leadership, production, logistics, or another fast-paced environment.
- Comfortable working with KPIs and continuously improving operational efficiency.
- Hands-on problem solver who enjoys being close to the team and the operation.
- Strong communication skills and ability to work with technical teams.
- Comfortable working in a fast-moving startup environment.

## Nice to Have

- Experience managing shift-based or operational teams.
- Experience in robotics, hardware, manufacturing, or data collection.
- Experience recruiting and onboarding high-volume operational teams.

## About Mimic Robotics

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Mimic Robotics builds general-purpose robots for factory floors, using frontier AI and video-action models to achieve dexterous, autonomous manipulation in unstructured environments.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; $20.8M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Zurich, Switzerland (with a research unit in San Francisco, USA)
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Benedek Forrai (Co-Founder & Lead Roboticist), Stephan-Daniel Gravert (Co-Founder & CPO), Robert Katzschmann (Co-founder & Scientific Advisor)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Robotics engineering / AI-powered industrial automation
- **Target customers**: B2B – manufacturing, logistics, and other operations that involve complex, tedious manual tasks
- **Mission**: “enable humanity to create, produce and manufacture at will, with minimum effort” [mimicrobotics.com](https://www.mimicrobotics.com/about)

## Products & Services
- **Video-Action Models**: A proprietary AI paradigm that leverages large-scale video pre-training to predict and execute robot actions, generalizing across unseen tasks and adapting to real-world variability.
- **MIMIC-ONE Hand**: A 16‑DoF tendon‑driven humanoid hand controlled by a diffusion‑based architecture, achieving up to 93.3% task success on unseen tasks.
- **LAD (Latent Action Diffusion)**: A framework that aligns action spaces across human hands, robotic hands, and grippers via contrastive learning, enabling a single policy to control multiple robot embodiments.
- **MAPLE**: A research collaboration with ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research that learns dexterous manipulation priors from large‑scale egocentric video of human hand interactions.
- **Robot Stations**: Available in one‑ or two‑arm configurations, mounted on a stationary table or an autonomous mobile platform – platform‑agnostic to fit the customer’s specific use case.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$20.8 million** (as of 2025, including a $16M seed round led by Speedinvest and Elaia, plus grants from Venture Kick, Innosuisse, and others) [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/mimicrobotics)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Speedinvest, Elaia, Venture Kick, Innosuisse; research partners include ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount of 40 employees (~166.7% YoY growth)
  - LinkedIn following of 18,395 (+273.6% YoY)
  - Featured among Switzerland’s most exciting emerging ventures
  - Active job postings for AI, robotics, and field engineering roles

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary Video-Action Models** that outperform traditional VLA (Vision-Language-Action) models by using native video pre-training with rich physics representations.
- **Cross‑embodiment learning** via LAD, allowing a single model to control different robot hands and grippers, delivering ~25% improvement in manipulation success.
- **Full‑stack approach** from AI research to hardware design (custom 16‑DoF humanoid hand) and deployment in customer facilities.
- **World‑class team** drawing talent from Google DeepMind, Tesla Optimus, ETH Zurich, MIT, and Stanford.

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling from research to real‑world customer deployments: “delivering value to our customers and their everyday operational reality.”
- Expanding the team across AI research, hardware, robotics, data operations, and business development.
- Building a “general purpose robot” that can be rapidly adapted to new use cases, driving down the cost and complexity of industrial automation.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Bias toward action” – solving real problems on factory floors, not just publishing papers. Tight‑knit team of ~50 people from diverse backgrounds.
- **Work environment**: In‑office roles in Zurich (HQ) and San Francisco; roles include AI Research Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, Embedded Systems Engineer, and Field Engineer.
- **Engineering culture**: Cutting‑edge AI research combined with hands‑on hardware and systems work; collaboration with top academic labs (ETH Zurich, MIT).
- **Growth opportunity**: Join a fast‑growing startup (166% headcount increase) at the frontier of physical AI, with direct impact on product and customer success.

## Sources
1. [mimicrobotics.com – Homepage](https://www.mimicrobotics.com/)
2. [mimicrobotics.com – About](https://www.mimicrobotics.com/about)
3. [mimicrobotics.com – Careers](https://www.mimicrobotics.com/careers)
4. [jobs.gem.com – Mimic Robotics Open Positions](https://jobs.gem.com/mimicrobotics-com)
5. [linkedin.com – Mimic Robotics Company Page](https://linkedin.com/company/mimicrobotics)

## Other roles at Mimic Robotics

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- [AI Research Engineering Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-research-engineering-lead-mimic-robotics-zurich-msxz97tz8s9e) — Zurich, Switzerland
- [Robot Operator (80 - 100%)](https://feeny.ai/job/robot-operator-80-100-mimic-robotics-zurich-enfps61bwgc8) — Zurich, Switzerland
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- [Field Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/field-engineer-mimic-robotics-zurich-cgyajzmvrsg7) — Zurich, Switzerland
- [Data Collector / part-time job / 8 to 40 hours a week](https://feeny.ai/job/data-collector-part-time-job-8-to-40-hours-a-week-mimic-robotics-zurich-kex12q53kebp) — Zurich, Switzerland