Business Development Manager – Physical AI

Business Development Manager

We are seeking a Business Development Manager to drive growth in FPGA-based solutions across the Physical AI domain – spanning robotics, autonomous systems, industrial and factory automation, and edge AI. This role focuses on expanding design wins across intelligent machines that sense, decide, and act in the physical world, from collaborative robots and autonomous platforms to factory-automation controllers and edge AI appliances.

You will act as the bridge between customers, product management, engineering, and ecosystem partners to position FPGA solutions against competing architectures including ASSPs/SoCs, GPUs, and microcontroller-based platforms.

Physical AI is converging perception, decision, and actuation onto real-time machines while pushing more intelligence to the edge, and industrial automation is moving toward connected, software-defined, and AI-enabled factories. FPGAs are uniquely positioned to unify deterministic control, sensor fusion, real-time networking, and edge AI inference on a single adaptable platform. As several of these markets are fast-emerging, the role includes helping establish and scale the market motion – which requires strong technical business leadership at the system level.

1. Market Development & Strategy

• Identify and prioritize target segments including:
• Robotics: industrial and collaborative robots (cobots), autonomous mobile robots (AMR/AGV), humanoids, end-of-arm tooling
• Autonomous systems: drones / UAVs, autonomous ground and off-road vehicles, autonomous material handling
• Industrial and factory automation: PLC / PAC controllers, motion and servo-drive control, machine control, IIoT / edge gateways
• Edge AI: edge AI appliances and gateways, smart cameras and sensors, on-premise inference platforms
• Track and interpret trends in:
• Edge AI and on-device inference (model deployment, quantization, AI acceleration)
• Multi-sensor fusion (camera, LiDAR, IMU, force / torque)
• Real-time deterministic control, multi-axis motion, and industrial networking convergence (fieldbus → TSN)
• Industry 4.0 / IIoT, predictive maintenance, and the software-defined factory
• Robotics and autonomy software stacks (ROS / ROS2) and AI frameworks
• Identify opportunities where customers require:
• Deterministic, low-latency control and motion loops
• High-throughput, low-power edge AI inference
• Multi-sensor aggregation and time synchronization
• Functional safety for human-machine collaboration
• Reconfigurability across evolving platforms and long industrial life cycles

2. Customer Engagement & Design Wins

• Build relationships with robotics OEMs, industrial-automation vendors (controls, drives, machine builders), autonomous-system developers, edge AI platform vendors, module / subsystem suppliers, and system integrators
• Drive early-stage engagement with Sales to:
• Influence system and safety architecture decisions
• Position FPGA-based solutions across control, sensing, networking, and edge AI systems
• Secure design-ins across platforms, machines, and derivatives
• Support technical sales discussions spanning:
• Motor / motion control (field-oriented control, multi-axis servo, encoder interfacing)
• Industrial control and real-time networking (PLC / PAC, EtherCAT, PROFINET, Ether Net/IP, TSN)
• Sensor fusion and perception pipelines
• Edge AI / ML inference (CNN- and transformer-based workloads)
• Functional-safety implementation (safe motion, redundancy, diagnostics)
• Engage in system-level discussions involving:
• Perception → planning → actuation pipelines
• Centralized vs distributed control architectures (robot, machine, and factory cell)
• Deterministic vs GPU-based processing trade-offs

3. Ecosystem & Partnerships

• Build and manage relationships with:
• Sensor, encoder, and actuator / drive vendors
• Industrial networking, controls, and automation-software vendors
• IP providers and software / AI stack vendors (ROS ecosystem, vision / AI frameworks)
• Robotics and automation module makers, ODMs, and system integrators
• Enable joint solutions and reference designs to accelerate customer adoption

4. Sales Enablement & Execution

• Develop high-impact sales collateral including solution briefs, reference architectures…