Head of Robotics Data Acquisition & Strategy at Mind Robotics · LumiJobs

Responsibilities

Own the data purchase plan. Build and maintain Mind's annual and quarterly data acquisition plan: hours by modality (teleoperation, egocentric human video, handheld/wearable capture, motion capture, simulation and synthetic data), task, embodiment, and environment, tied to the research roadmap, model evaluation targets, and budget.
Measure the marginal value of data. Partner with research to design and run data ablations, scaling studies, and data-mixture experiments that quantify how each additional hour of a given data type moves policy performance on held-out evaluations. Translate results into cost per unit of model improvement and use them to reallocate spend.
Run vendor selection end to end. Run market scans, RFPs, and paid pilot collections with defined acceptance criteria. Conduct technical diligence on vendors' collection rigs, sensor configurations, calibration and synchronization, metadata, annotation pipelines, and their ability to scale.
Manage the vendor portfolio. Negotiate contracts and SLAs; set and enforce quality specifications (sensor sync, frame rates, calibration, annotation accuracy, task coverage); track throughput, cost per usable hour, and delivery cadence; and expand, renegotiate, or exit partners based on measured value.
Define data specifications with research and data infrastructure. Set the formats, schemas, sensor modalities, labeling taxonomies, and acceptance tests that purchased data must meet so it lands training-ready, and close the loop on quality issues found downstream.
Make build-versus-buy calls. Weigh external purchases against Mind's own in-house and factory-floor collection, and recommend where each dollar of data budget creates the most value.
Be our eyes and ears in the market. Maintain a living map of the robotics data landscape: who is collecting what, by which methods, at what price, quality, and capacity, and which new collection approaches are emerging.
Bring the outside in. Attend major robotics and ML conferences (e.g. CoRL, RSS, ICRA, CVPR, NeurIPS), visit vendor and field sites, and synthesize what you learn into regular briefings and recommendations that shape the research org's priorities.
Manage data rights and risk. Partner with Legal and Finance on data licensing, IP and usage rights, privacy and consent for human-subject data, and contract terms, so every dataset we buy is one we can use.
Set direction for the Data Acquisition function. Advise executive staff on data investment bets, establish the function's operating cadence and metrics, and hire as scope grows.

Head of Robotics Data Acquisition & Strategy

Responsibilities

Qualification

Required

Company

Mind Robotics

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