{"id":1049440,"url":"https://alion.io/job/ifs-vp-robotics-engineering-2","title":"VP Robotics Engineering","company":{"id":4263,"name":"IFS","domain":"ifs.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/ifs","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"SmartRecruiters","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":29,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":41,"computed_at":"2026-09-29T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":121000,"max_usd":238000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":35},"experience_years_min":15,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Gazebo","optional":false},{"name":"GraphQL","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"Isaac Sim","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LangGraph","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"MQTT","optional":false},{"name":"OPC UA","optional":false},{"name":"Pydantic AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"ROS","optional":false},{"name":"Teleoperation","optional":false},{"name":"Time Series Forecasting","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Vision-Language-Action","optional":false},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-11T11:09:01Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-11","last_verified_at":"2026-09-29T05:19:14Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":18,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":18},"description":"IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. Our leading AI technology is the backbone of our award-winning enterprise software solutions, enabling our customers to be their best when it really matters-at the Moment of Service™. Our commitment to internal AI adoption has allowed us to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring our colleagues can unlock their creativity and productivity, and our solutions are always cutting-edge.\nAt IFS, we’re flexible, we’re innovative, and we’re focused not only on how we can engage with our customers but on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society’s greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.\nWe celebrate diversity and understand our responsibility to reflect the diverse world we work in. We are committed to promoting an inclusive workforce that fully represents the many different cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints of our customers, our partners, and our communities. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.\nBy joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.\nWe’re looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs. With the power of our AI-driven solutions, we empower our team to change the status quo and make a real difference.\nIf you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.\nAbout the CTO Office\nThe CTO Office is an independent unit within Product & Customer with a dual mandate: track what is genuinely happening at the frontier of the industry, and convert it into technology strategy and working software inside IFS. It operates close to the executive team, frontier AI labs, robotics OEMs, and strategic partners.\n The role\nYou will define and build the robotics integration architecture for the IFS suite and grow the engineering team that delivers it. This is a software role. You will not design actuators, motion control, or perception stacks, and hardware experience is not required. What is required is deep, current working knowledge of the software surfaces of the major robot OEM platforms: their SDKs, APIs, fleet managers, autonomy stacks, data models, and their real limitations.\nYou will also be the engineering counterpart to our robotics ecosystem: OEMs, robotics foundation model companies, startup networks, and standards bodies. When an OEM partner puts their platform engineers in a room, you are the person on our side of the table.\nIt is a player-coach role in a unit that ships. You will build the first integrations yourself, prove them with real customers and live demos, then scale the capability through the team you hire.\nWhat you will do\nOwn the agent-first integration architecture between the IFS suite and robotics OEM platforms, from reference design to production\n\nBuild the abstraction layer that lets IFS agents and applications treat heterogeneous robot fleets as dispatchable, auditable executors of work\n\nDeliver working integrations hands-on: work order dispatch to robots, mission and task orchestration, telemetry and inspection data flowing into asset and service records\n\nEvaluate OEM platforms on engineering merit and steer where IFS invests integration effort; kill weak options early\n\nRepresent IFS in technical engagements with robot OEMs, robotics foundation model providers, and interoperability bodies\n\nHire and lead a robotics integration engineering team and set its technical bar\n\nShip demonstrable outcomes on real customer scenarios and flagship events, on hard dates\n\nBrief executives and customers on the robotics roadmap in commercial terms\n\nWhat we are looking for\n15+ years in software engineering, with several years architecting integration or platform layers used in production at enterprise scale\n\nDemonstrable working knowledge of at least 2 major robot OEM ecosystems at the SDK and API level: you have built against them, not read about them\n\nStill keyboard-credible: you prototype, review PRs, and debug integrations. We will verify this in the interview process\n\nApplied AI capability: production experience with agentic systems, tool use and function calling, and orchestration of long-running autonomous tasks\n\nFluency in the operational reality of robots in industrial settings: connectivity, safety interlocks, teleoperation and human-in-the-loop handover, degraded modes, and what actually breaks in deployment\n\nExperience leading engineering teams and dealing with external partner engineering organisations\n\nClear written and spoken communication at executive level; comfortable presenting live demos\n\nTechnical depth expected\nWe hire for depth per area, not a keyword count. The named platforms and tools are examples; strong equivalents are fine. Expect to be tested on the areas below.\nOEM platforms and SDKs: hands-on integration experience with platforms such as Boston Dynamics (Spot SDK), Agility Robotics, Unitree, ANYbotics, or comparable quadruped, humanoid, AMR, or drone ecosystems; understanding of their mission APIs, fleet managers, autonomy behaviours, and payload and data interfaces\n\nRobotics middleware and interoperability: ROS 2 (topics, services, actions, DDS) at integration level; fleet interoperability standards such as VDA 5050, the MassRobotics Interoperability Standard, and Open-RMF; where these standards genuinely work and where they fall short\n\nAgent-first integration: designing AI agents that plan, dispatch, and supervise robot missions; MCP servers and tool interfaces over robot APIs; orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, Pydantic AI, or provider-native SDKs; permissioning, human-in-the-loop escalation, and audit trails for autonomous physical action\n\nRobotics foundation models: working awareness of VLA and omni models for robots (for example SkildAI, Physical Intelligence, Nvidia GR00T) and what they change about the integration surface over the next 2 to 3 years\n\nIndustrial data and telemetry: MQTT, OPC UA, and event-driven ingestion of robot telemetry, inspection imagery, and sensor data into enterprise systems; time-series handling at fleet scale\n\nSimulation and validation: using simulation environments (Isaac Sim, Gazebo, or OEM-native simulators) to validate integrations and demos without waiting on hardware availability\n\nEnterprise integration: API design and consumption at scale, including REST, OData, GraphQL, and webhook/event patterns into ERP, EAM, and FSM systems; mapping robot missions onto work orders, assets, and service processes\n\nLanguages and platform: expert-level Python and TypeScript; able to read C++ where OEM SDKs demand it; production Kubernetes and containerisation, CI/CD, and edge deployment patterns for on-site connectivity\n\nSecurity and safety posture: identity and authorisation for machine actors, network segmentation for OT environments, and the audit and traceability expectations that come with software commanding physical machines\n\nWhat sets candidates apart\nPrior work connecting robots or autonomous systems to business systems (ERP, EAM, WMS, MES) rather than to other robots\n\nExposure to asset-intensive or field service domains: utilities, manufacturing, aviation, energy, logistics\n\nExperience in an OEM or fleet management vendor engineering organisation, seen from the inside\n\nStandards body or interoperability consortium participation\n\n0-to-1 experience standing up a new engineering capability inside a larger organisation\n\nHow we assess\nA walkthrough of integrations you have personally architected and shipped against real robot platforms, a technical deep dive on your agent-first design approach and how you handle autonomy, safety handover, and auditability, and a working session on a live integration problem. References will be asked specifically about hands-on contribution and OEM engagement, not leadership style.\nPracticalities\nLocation and working model: Virtual/Hybrid - location dependent\n\nCompensation: Upon discussion\n\nInternational travel to OEM partners, customers, and flagship events (Europe and US, some Asia)\n\n We embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8922,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":15,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Hybrid work"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"},{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Predictive Analytics","Electronic Warfare"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-18T23:29:42Z"}],"liveness":{"score":56,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.623,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":17,"expected_fill_days":41,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:mid","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-09-29T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/ifs-vp-robotics-engineering-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/ifs-vp-robotics-engineering-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-30T00:42:39Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":552,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":4448,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-01T00:00:00Z"}}}