Director of Embodied AI, Data Foundry

Stord operates the largest independent e-commerce fulfillment network in the US — 20+ fulfillment centers, 4,000+ warehouse associates, and nearly 100 million packages shipped annually. We are building a new business line that turns this operational infrastructure into some of the most valuable training data assets in physical AI.

We are looking for an early leader to build this business from the ground up.

What You Will Own

You are the first dedicated hire for this initiative, reporting directly to the CTO and Co-Founder.

You will own the early Embodied AI business line: the product, the customers, the capture program, data operations, the team, and the P&L. This is a builder-operator role. You will:

• Close customers. You will run customer discovery and close initial pilot deals with humanoid robotics, labs, and physical AI companies. You will sit across from their VPs of AI and Heads of Data, understand what their training pipelines need, and translate that into what Stord delivers.

• Define and deliver the product. You will own the data product across quality tiers — from RGB egocentric video through depth-enhanced and full multimodal capture with hand pose and annotations. You will decide what gets built, in what order, based on what buyers will actually pay for. You will hold the line on quality.

• Run the capture and delivery program. You will stand up the warehouse capture operation: camera and rig hardware selection, enrollment, edge processing, and the processing pipelines that package datasets for delivery. You will coordinate across warehouse operations, engineering, and customers to ship datasets on spec and on schedule.

• Build the team. You will hire and lead a small, incredibly senior team, expanding as the business scales. You set the technical direction and quality bar; they build. You make the architecture and tradeoff decisions; you do not need to write every line of code, but you need to be technical enough to know when the design is right.

What You Bring

• You have run a data operation or data product end to end at a robotics or AI data company. You have owned the full lifecycle: defining what data to collect, managing how it gets captured and annotated, deploying hardware capture systems, ensuring quality, and delivering it to ML teams who depend on it.

• You are technical enough to lead engineers and make architecture decisions, but your core strength is execution across many moving parts. You can read a pipeline design and know if it is sound. You understand computer vision and ML data formats well enough to talk credibly with both your engineers and your customers. You do not need to be the one writing the pipeline — you need to be the one who makes sure the right pipeline gets built and the right data gets delivered.

• You have commercial instinct. Either you have sold data products to robotics or AI labs, or you have been the ML customer buying data and know exactly what separates a dataset worth paying for from one that is not. You can run a discovery conversation, translate customer needs into a product spec, and carry a deal to close.

• You operate across altitudes without friction — negotiating pilot terms in the morning, reviewing an annotation quality report at noon, and briefing a warehouse general manager on deployments in the afternoon. This role lives at the intersection of product, commercial, operations, and engineering, every day.

• You know the physical AI landscape. You understand who the humanoid robotics players are, what vision-language-action models need to train, and why egocentric demonstration data is the bottleneck for deploying robots into the real world.

Why This Role

This is a rare opportunity to build a high-growth business from the ground-up with infrastructure and resources to support. You will have:

• A structural moat that no startup can replicate

• Direct access to the fastest-growing buyer market in AI

• A CTO/Co-Founder as your direct partner who will run initial buyer conversations alongside you and remove internal obstacles.