---
title: 'Sr Business Development & Ops Lead, Robotics & Physical AI at World Labs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/sr-business-development-ops-lead-robotics-physical-ai-world-labs-san-francisco-wva4th36mx4s'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Sr Business Development & Ops Lead, Robotics & Physical AI at World Labs

- **Company:** World Labs
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Posted:** 2026-08-17
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/worldlabs/jobs/4371536009

## Job description

## About World Labs

[World Labs](https://www.worldlabs.ai/) is a frontier AI research and product company advancing [spatial intelligence](https://drfeifei.substack.com/p/from-words-to-worlds-spatial-intelligence), the next frontier beyond large language models. Co-founded by [Dr. Fei-Fei Li](https://profiles.stanford.edu/fei-fei-li), [Justin Johnson](https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-johnson-41b43664/) and [Ben Mildenhall](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-mildenhall-86b4739b/), the company is pioneering world models that perceive, generate, reason, and interact with virtual and physical worlds.

The company’s flagship product, [Marble](https://marble.worldlabs.ai/), transforms text, images, and video into fully navigable 3D worlds, unlocking applications across gaming, film, architecture, robotics, and immersive digital experiences. Backed by leading investors and with over $1B raised, World Labs is assembling a world-class team at the intersection of AI research and real-world deployment.

## Role Overview

We are looking for a Sr Business Development and Operations Lead to help shape how World Labs brings its robotics technology to market.

This is a highly technical, hands-on business development role at the intersection of Physical AI, simulation, spatial intelligence and enterprise customers. You will be part of our world-class teams partnering closely with research and engineering groups to understand what our technology can do today, where it is heading, and where it can create meaningful value for robotics teams in the real world.

You will own the full lifecycle of strategic and operational customer engagements: from identifying the right problems and shaping the solution to building the commercial relationship and closing the deal.

## What You Will Do

Market + Technical Understanding

- Develop a deep understanding of our robotics technology, its capabilities and limitations, and how the broader robotics and Physical AI ecosystem is evolving.
- Identify the customers, use cases, and problems where our technology can create differentiated value, and develop a strong point of view on where the market is heading.

Customer Discovery + Feedback Loop

- Spend meaningful time with customers to understand their workflows, technical constraints, deployment environments, and unmet needs firsthand.
- Build a tight feedback loop between customers and the team: translate problems back to research and engineering, synthesize patterns, and help distinguish scalable product opportunities from one-off customization.

Commercialization + Closing

- Shape and execute early customer engagements, pilots, and partnerships in close collaboration with research, engineering, and product teams.
- Own strategic opportunities end to end: from prospecting and discovery through technical evaluation, commercial structure, negotiation, contracting, and close.

Operating + Building the Function

- Build the operational foundation for an early commercial function: maintain customer and opportunity pipelines, establish lightweight processes, drive follow-through, unblock dependencies, and make sure commitments get delivered.

## What We Are Looking For

- 8+ years of experience in related industries.
- Deep experience in robotics, Physical AI, autonomous systems, simulation, or an adjacent frontier technology, with firsthand exposure to customers, products, or deployments.
- Technical fluency to engage credibly with researchers and engineers, with strong curiosity to understand how the technology works and draw connections between technical capabilities and market opportunities.
- Strong understanding of the different generations of robotics technology - from traditional automation, through the computer-vision-driven wave of robotics, to today’s frontier in imitation learning, reinforcement learning, robot foundation models, and sim-to-real.
- Demonstrated ability to develop and close complex B2B relationships, from ambiguous early conversations through signed agreements.
- Strong market and adoption judgment: you understand where new robotics capabilities will find pull first, which customers and use cases to prioritize, and how to sequence entry across markets. You can reason across environments including logistics and warehousing, industrial and scientific labs, electronics manufacturing, automotive, defense, and emerging consumer/home applications.
- Ability to turn technical capability into repeatable commercial value: identify the right wedge, business model, pricing, and channel strategy, and build a path from demo → paid PoC → production deployment while avoiding bespoke work that does not scale.
- Comfortable quantifying and defending commercial decisions: you can build a credible pipeline forecast, price a pilot, or model a deal structure with real numbers behind it.
- Builder mentality. You thrive in the ambiguity of early commercialization, creating the processes, tools, and operating cadence needed while figuring out what works.
- Experience being an early or founding commercial hire inside a highly technical organization: you know how to earn credibility with researchers and engineers, not just with enterprise buyers.
- Low ego and highly collaborative. You seek the best ideas regardless of where they come from, build closely with the team, and do what is needed to deliver results.

## How You Operate

- Pursuit of Greatness: You have a high bar for the work and the ambition to help build a category-defining business. You are not satisfied with the obvious answer, are willing to take bold swings, and go beyond what is required to create an exceptional outcome.
- Intellectual Honesty: You are deeply curious about customers, technology, and the market. You seek what is true rather than what validates an existing thesis, listen closely to users, and are willing to change your point of view when the evidence changes.
- Deliver Results: You own outcomes end to end. You turn conversations into actions, close loops, unblock yourself and others, and get things done—even when the path, process, or ownership is not perfectly defined.
- Build Together: You work side by side with research, engineering, product, and operations. You communicate constructively, seek the best idea rather than your idea, and can disagree, commit, and move forward as one team.

We're hiring the brightest minds from around the globe to bring diverse perspectives to our cutting-edge work. If you're ready to work on technology that will reshape how machines perceive and interact with the world, World Labs is your launchpad.

Join us, and let's make history together.

## Equal Opportunity & Pay Transparency

## Equal Employment Opportunity

World Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable law. We welcome all qualified applicants and are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process upon request.

California Pay Transparency

In accordance with California law, we disclose the following:

Pay Range

$250-$350k base salary (good-faith estimate for San Francisco Bay Area upon hire; actual offer based on experience, skills, and qualifications)

Total Compensation

Base salary plus equity awards

Salary History

We do not request or consider prior compensation in making offers

Compliance: Cal. Lab. Code §432.3 (pay scale disclosure & salary history ban); Cal. Lab. Code §1197.5 (Equal Pay Act); Cal. Gov. Code §12940 (FEHA); 42 U.S.C. §2000e (Title VII); 29 U.S.C. §621 (ADEA); 42 U.S.C. §12101 (ADA)

## About World Labs

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: World Labs builds frontier spatial intelligence models (Large World Models) that perceive, generate, reason, and interact with 3D environments, enabling anyone to create persistent 3D worlds from text, images, or video.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, Ben Mildenhall

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Spatial Intelligence / Generative 3D Models
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises in entertainment, education, design, simulation, robotics, and storytelling; also individual creators and developers via the product Marble.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Spatial intelligence transforms seeing into doing, understanding into reasoning, and imagining into creating.” The company aims to unlock AI’s full potential by moving from 2D pixels to full 3D worlds.

## Products & Services
- **Marble**: A generative 3D world creation platform that produces spatially consistent, high-fidelity, and persistent 3D environments from a single image, video, text prompt, or 360 panorama. Supports multimodal inputs, interactive editing, export to various 2D/3D formats, and collaborative sharing on the web. (Type: SaaS / API)
- **Large World Models (LWMs)**: The underlying research and foundation models that power Marble and future applications for simulation, robotics, and scientific discovery. (Type: Research / API / Foundation Model)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company).
- **Key Metric**: Total funding – **USD 1.23 billion** raised across 6 rounds (Seed, Venture Rounds, and Series C).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Andreessen Horowitz, Radical Ventures (lead investors in seed round), Temasek, Sanabil Investments, Cisco Investments, and 39+ other institutional investors (per CB Insights). Major tech talent hires from Meta, Google, NVIDIA, Adobe, and Microsoft.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew **171% YoY** to 58 employees (as of mid-2026).
  - Monthly headcount growth rate of **+23.5%**.
  - Series C of **USD 1.0 billion** closed in February 2026 (confirmed by multiple sources).
  - Early customer/product traction with Marble, including case studies and hands-on tutorials.
  - Strong research presence with regular technical publications (e.g., “A Functional Taxonomy of World Models”, “Streaming 3D Gaussian Splatting”).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Pioneering spatial intelligence**: Combines generative AI, computer vision, and graphics to create coherent, editable 3D worlds – a capability that few companies have mastered at this scale.
- **World-class founding team**: Led by Fei-Fei Li (AI pioneer, ImageNet creator) and technologists with deep expertise in neural rendering, 3D reconstruction, and generative modeling (Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, Ben Mildenhall).
- **Tight research-to-product loop**: The company intentionally integrates cutting-edge research with product engineering, enabling rapid deployment of novel capabilities (e.g., Marble’s multimodal input support).
- **Massive funding and investor confidence**: $1.23B in funding, including a $1B Series C, provides long runway for ambitious R&D and scaling.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling the Marble platform, refining Large World Models, and expanding use cases into storytelling, simulation, robotics, and scientific discovery. Also focused on hiring top-tier talent across research, engineering, and product.
- **Growth direction**: Continue to push the frontier of 3D generative AI, enabling “the universal interface” for 3D content creation, and eventually interacting with both virtual and physical worlds through spatial intelligence.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: “A tight feedback loop between research, engineering, and product” – the company values curiosity, creativity, and rapid scientific progress. They emphasize that “now is a unique moment where rapid scientific progress has thinned the barrier between research and applications.”
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: All current job listings are based in San Francisco, CA, indicating an on-site or hybrid expectation. The company’s headquarters is at 640 2nd Street, San Francisco.
- **Notable perks or engineering culture**: Small, fast-growing team (58 people) with deep tech talent from top AI labs (Meta, Google, NVIDIA). Strong focus on real impact and shipping products. Technical stack includes Python, TypeScript, Slack, and modern sprint/launch workflows. Opportunity to work directly with world-renowned researchers and engineers on foundational AI challenges.

## Sources
1. [World Labs website](https://www.worldlabs.ai/)
2. [World Labs About page](https://www.worldlabs.ai/about)
3. [World Labs Careers on Greenhouse](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/worldlabs)
4. [World Labs LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/world-labs)
5. [CB Insights – World Labs](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/world-labs)

## Other roles at World Labs

- [Executive Business Partner (Office of the CEO)](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-business-partner-office-of-the-ceo-world-labs-san-francisco-h8tft89e4wz2) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer / Scientist (Robot Learning)](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-scientist-robot-learning-world-labs-san-francisco-8k339q5nbper) — San Francisco, CA
- [Performance Engineer (Inference, Training & GPU)](https://feeny.ai/job/performance-engineer-inference-training-gpu-world-labs-san-francisco-8zx2g2p309p9) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer / Scientist (SLAM)](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-scientist-slam-world-labs-san-francisco-6c0p98x1m6hj) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer / Scientist (3D Tech Lead)](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-scientist-3d-tech-lead-world-labs-san-francisco-mtzh9rjcf19w) — San Francisco, CA
- [Pipeline Engineer (Graphics/3D)](https://feeny.ai/job/pipeline-engineer-graphics-3d-world-labs-san-francisco-an10aaj3cm5e) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Product Engineer (Tech Lead)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-engineer-tech-lead-world-labs-san-francisco-tdya350kb5fa) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Scientist (Generative Modeling)](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-generative-modeling-world-labs-san-francisco-r7yv2e73347f) — San Francisco, CA