Robot Training Jobs This Week: 1,124 Open Roles, Alignerr Joins the Board, $30M for Chore Footage

Robot fleet operations grew the most, from 240 to 247 roles with 16 new listings, at a median of $27/hr. Autonomous vehicle and drone operator roles eased from 523 to 512 as 20 listings came down and 9 went up, while their median posted pay held at about $30.50/hr.

Egocentric and wearable capture added 3 roles to reach 121, teleoperation slipped to 69, and embodied-AI data annotation fell to 11. Amazon Prime Air posted 4 new roles for its drone delivery program and micro1 posted 2.

New boards read for the first time this week: Alignerr, RemoExperts (6 roles), Scout AI (5), REVEL, ALTEN Technology USA, Gecko Robotics, Saildrone and others. Week-on-week figures leave them out until they have a full week on record, so a new board never reads as a hiring jump.

Maxinsights, a Santa Clara startup that turns footage of everyday chores into robot training data, raised $30 million in seed funding led by Peak XV. Encord released EMG-1, an open dataset of more than 300 hours of forearm muscle signals paired with first-person video, and opened a research division for physical AI data. YYForce is recording experienced housekeepers at a Novotel hotel with head-mounted and wrist cameras, to build a dataset for humanoid housekeepers.

Model makers raised large rounds too: Dream Labs $90 million in seed funding, Eka Robotics a $150 million Series A, and Imperial College spinout Machenta $40 million. Bloomberg reported that Physical Intelligence is in talks to raise about $1 billion. Robot model makers like these are the buyers of demonstrations, teleoperation hours and annotated video, the work this board lists. The full record is in our funding dataset.

Waymo said it is laying the groundwork for rides in the Madrid region, starting with manual driving by local trained drivers before technical validation, with first riders planned for 2027. It also added nearly 250 square miles of service area across five US cities. Bolt said its fleet of at least 25,000 autonomous Lucid vehicles will start with a data-collection phase, whose drivers collect real-world driving data.

In trucking, Kodiak signed its first binding deal for driverless trucks on public highways with DTL Transport, and Aurora signed a memorandum with Charger Logistics for up to 500 Aurora Driver trucks delivered over 2027 and 2028. Tesla started Optimus production in Fremont and said its robotaxi service passed nearly 2 million unsupervised miles. In drones, Wing partnered with KDDI to launch delivery in Japan by the end of 2027, and Matternet began NHS deliveries at Great Ormond Street Hospital. The FAA's beyond-visual-line-of-sight rule (Part 108), which decides how many drones one remote pilot may supervise, is still under White House review.