Technical Program Manager, Fauna

Fauna Robotics is looking for a Technical Program Manager to own quality for robot behavior and data collection. You will write and maintain the test suite that every release and every new policy goes through. That suite has two layers. The first is a core set of regression tests that confirms, every time, that the robot's locomotion, manipulation, mode transitions, and autonomy hand-offs still behave as expected.

The second, and harder, layer goes looking for the subtle problems a routine pass will miss: failures that appear only in particular sequences of events, under particular loads, or in the interaction between the operator, the teleoperation stack, and the robot. You will run these tests yourself on experimental hardware, write clear and reproducible reports, and work with the engineering teams until each issue is understood and resolved.

You will also help keep the data we collect at a high quality through hands-on, on-site work with the robots: supporting benchmark collections, reviewing recorded episodes, and tracking data problems back to their root cause, whether that's the operator, the teleoperation stack, the robot, or the pipeline. As new collection tasks come out of research, you'll pilot them on hardware with the data scientists who designed them, validate the tools and methods they depend on, and say whether they're ready to run 'll be the go-to person for bringing new data collectors and QA team members up to speed on our teleoperation stack, our data collection management and ingestion tools, and the basics of finding, triaging, and reporting bugs.

• Own the release test suite for robot behavior and teleoperation. Write, maintain, and run test plans for updates to the teleoperation stack, internal and external software releases, and new robot policies.
• Maintain a repeatable core regression suite that every change must pass, and extend it with deeper, adversarial test cases designed to surface subtle, intermittent, or interaction-dependent failures across the operator, the teleoperation stack, and the robot.
• Run tests hands-on with experimental robots and in simulation. Write detailed, reproducible test reports and bug reports, and give clear go/no-go recommendations for each release and each new policy.
• Track issues through to resolution with software, controls, hardware, and ML teams. Keep a record of known issues, how to reproduce them, and workarounds.
• Support data quality through hands-on, on-robot testing: help run benchmark collections, review recordings against task requirements, flag problem episodes, and feed the failure patterns you find back to the teams that own the process and tooling.
• Pilot new data collection tasks alongside data scientists and research engineers: translate research intent into an executable protocol, run the first sessions yourself, and report back on feasibility, throughput, and data quality.
• Validate the data collection tools and methods behind each task before they're relied on at scale — define acceptance criteria, quantify failure modes, and make the go/no-go call. Iterate on task setups, scene design, and annotation schemas where the data doesn't hold up.
• Onboard and mentor new data collectors and QA team members on our teleoperation stack, the data collection management system, the ingestion and annotation tools, and how to report bugs well.
• Coordinate the day-to-day test and benchmark activities that data collectors take part in. Work with the data collection program manager, who owns the data collectors' work and priorities, to schedule robot time, sessions, and test coverage.
• Assess the spaces and resources that testing and collection depend on — lab and home-like environments, robot availability, headsets…