Applications Engineering Manager (Boston)

The Applications Engineering Manager is a player-coach. You still know your way around a factory floor -- fixtures, I/O, ladder logic, robot programming, all the things -- and you use that expertise every day, both to stay sharp and to earn the respect of the team you're leading.

You'll manage a team of Applications Engineers across your territory, owning their development, their workload, and the quality of every customer engagement they touch. You'll be the escalation point when installs get complicated, the person who jumps on a plane when a customer situation needs senior eyes, and the one who sets the standard for what great applications engineering looks like at Standard Bots.

This is still a hands-on role. You're not managing from a desk. You're leading from the front.

You'll report directly to the VP of Applications Engineering.

What You'll Do

Team Leadership & Development

• Manage and develop a team of Applications Engineers across your territory -- setting expectations, coaching on technical and customer-facing skills, and building a team that executes at a high level
• Own capacity planning and workload distribution across your team -- making sure the right engineer is on the right job and nobody is drowning
• Be the technical and cultural standard-setter for your team; the bar you hold yourself to is the bar your team rises to
• Conduct regular 1:1s, performance conversations, and development planning -- you invest in your people's growth, not just their output

Territory & Customer Ownership

• Own the applications engineering function for your territory -- from pre-sales POC support through post-install customer success
• Serve as the senior technical escalation point for complex integrations, difficult customer situations, or installs that aren't going as planned
• Partner closely with your Regional Sales Manager on territory priorities, pipeline, and customer strategy -- you're the technical counterpart to their commercial leadership
• Maintain strong relationships with key customer accounts in your territory; they should know you by name and trust your judgment

Hands-On Technical Work

• Stay sharp and stay in it -- you're still designing solutions, reviewing integrations, commissioning cells, and supporting installs when the situation calls for it
• Lead or co-lead technically complex or strategically important customer engagements yourself
• Review and sign off on solution designs, POCs, and integration plans produced by your team
• Travel to customer sites as needed -- up to 25% domestically -- for escalations, key installs, and customer relationship moments

Standards & Continuous Improvement

• Define and enforce the standard for how applications engineering work gets done in your territory -- documentation, handoffs, commissioning checklists, customer training quality
• Feed territory-level learnings back to the broader applications engineering organization and to product and engineering teams
• Help build the playbooks, templates, and training materials that make every AE on your team better and every deployment more repeatable

What We're Looking For

• The same trifecta as our Applications Engineers -- you're genuinely fluent across mechanical, electrical, and software: PLC programming and ladder logic, pneumatics, DC power systems, robot programming, Python scripting, CAD
• 5+ years of hands-on applications engineering, systems integration, or automation engineering experience -- you've done the field work and done it well
• 2+ years of people management or team lead experience -- you've led engineers, given hard feedback, and helped someone grow
• Strong customer-facing skills and the ability to build relationships with clients.