Technical Project Manager, Applications & Solutions

Job type: Full Time · Department: Applications · Work type: On-Site

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Your New Role and Team

Sanctuary AI deploys its Embodied Intelligence Platform on industrial hardware into customer facilities. Each deployment runs as a project. A commercial requirement becomes a design, that design becomes a built and commissioned cell on a customer's floor, and the cell is tested against criteria agreed early in the engagement. As Sanctuary AI takes on more deployments in parallel, we are building a dedicated project management capability to support this work.

This is an engineering project management role, the kind you would find at a special-purpose machine builder or a system integrator, applied to robotics and physical AI. You will own the project plan and the project-level customer relationship from sales handover, through solution development alongside the Solutions Lead, and into installation, commissioning, and acceptance alongside the Deployment Lead. Schedule, budget, risk, reporting, and change control sit with you, as does keeping both sides aligned to the agreed requirements.

You will co-lead each engagement with a Solutions Engineer, who owns the technical solution and the design decisions behind it. Your focus is managing the project that carries that solution through design, deployment, and acceptance, on time and on budget.

Reporting into the Solutions and Customer Success Business Unit, you will work with Solutions, Deployment, Product Launch, Hardware, Platform/ML Ops, RME, and Supply Chain.

Success Criteria

  • Own an end-to-end project plan for each customer engagement, from sales handover through solution design, build, installation, commissioning, acceptance, and handover to steady-state operations, bringing team-level plans into a single integrated schedule.

  • Participate in the sales-to-solutions handover, converting the commercial commitment into a scoped project with a documented requirements baseline, deliverables, milestones, acceptance criteria, and an agreed change-control process.

  • Hold the company accountable to the agreed requirements. Maintain the baseline, run change control, and ensure every scope change is assessed for cost, schedule, and risk impact before committing to it, internally or with the customer.

  • Partner with the Solutions Lead through solution development. Review the design work, track deliverables against project gates, and keep design decisions documented and traceable to customer requirements.

  • Partner with the Deployment Lead through execution. Track site readiness, procurement of long-lead items, staff resourcing, factory and site acceptance testing (FAT/SAT) preparation and execution, commissioning, and the path to customer acceptance.

  • Own the risk register and associated mitigations, covering technical, schedule, supply chain, site, safety, and customer-side risks, each with a named owner, a date, and a current status.

  • Own project budget and cost control, including forecasting against actuals, labour and timesheet accuracy, capital and spares costs, and change orders. Report discrepancies early with a recovery plan.

  • Be the project-level point of contact for the customer's operations and engineering management. Lead status reporting and milestone and gate reviews, and actively track customer-side dependencies such as site preparation, power, network, safety approvals, and personnel.

  • Manage cross-functional dependencies internally across Solutions, Deployment, Hardware, Platform/ML Ops, RME, and Supply Chain, with a clear escalation path when necessary.

  • Build the project management toolkit for the team as deployments scale, including templates, gate definitions, reporting cadence, and lessons learned, so that each deployment is run better than the last.

Your Experience and Qualifications

  • Engineering degree in mechanical, electrical, mechatronics, or industrial engineering, or equivalent technical industry experience. APM, PMP, or PRINCE2 certification, or a P.Eng. designation, is an asset.

  • 5+ years managing engineering projects end to end at a special-purpose machinery builder, system integrator, robotics or automation supplier, or capital equipment manufacturer.

  • Track record running customer-facing projects from contract or handover through design, build, FAT/SAT, installation, commissioning, and formal acceptance.

  • Demonstrated ownership of schedule and budget on projects with hardware lead times, site constraints, and multidisciplinary teams.

  • Experience with requirements management and formal change control within a customer contract.

Skills

  • Fluent in the standard toolkit, including work breakdown structures, integrated schedules and critical path, cost tracking and forecasting, RAID and risk registers, gate reviews, and change orders.

  • Enough understanding of heavy equipment, robotics, controls, and systems integration to read a technical plan critically and know when an estimate is optimistic.

  • Hands-on with project and cost tools such as MS Project, Smartsheet, Jira, or equivalent, and with timesheet and labour-cost systems.

  • Clear, calm customer communicator who can communicate a slipped milestone with a credible plan attached.

  • Disciplined documenter who ensures project status is a matter of record rather than opinion.

Traits

  • Holds the line on scope and requirements without becoming the obstacle everyone routes around.

  • Comfortable co-leading, owning project delivery and commitments while the Solutions Engineer owns the technical design.

  • Addresses deviations before they become delays and escalates early rather than loudly.

  • Pragmatic and data-driven, applying as much process as the project needs and no more.

  • Builds structure where none exists and adapts it as products and processes keep evolving.


Working at Sanctuary AI

Sanctuary AI is an equal opportunity employer; employment with Sanctuary AI is governed based on skills, competence, and qualifications and will not be influenced in any way by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability, or any other legally protected status. In 2023, Sanctuary AI moved into a state-of-the-art office facility and has been recognized by LinkedIn as a Top Startup company.

Compensation and Benefits

Sanctuary offers a market-leading compensation package that includes competitive salaries, equity stakes, and a full suite of benefits for permanent employees, encompassing health coverage, paid time off, cutting-edge work facilities, and worksite flexibility by role. Our commitment to fairness ensures that our total compensation consistently surpasses market standards.

About Sanctuary AI

Founded in 2018, Sanctuary builds humanoid robots and a novel control system for them that integrates symbolic logic and reasoning with data-driven robot foundation models. We use our robots to collect vision, audio, touch, and proprioception data from the perspective of the robot while they perform real-world work tasks. We use that data to train multimodal robot foundation models. Because our systems are vertically integrated, we can design, deploy, and refine at scale. Our mission is to create the world's first human-like intelligence platform for robots.

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