Robot Training Jobs This Week: Zipline Raises $1.5B, Tesla Reaches San Antonio, Recording Gigs Close

Autonomous vehicle and drone operator roles rose from 544 to 550, with 15 new listings and 9 removed, at a median posted pay of $30.13/hr. Robot fleet operations eased from 226 to 218 as 15 listings came down and 7 went up, with its median at $26.50/hr.

Tesla went from 173 open roles to 158, taking down 25 and posting 10. HireArt, which recruits operators for robotics and self-driving clients, grew from 26 to 29, and autonomous trucking company Bot Auto doubled from 2 to 4.

Demonstration collection fell from 128 to 119 roles, with 14 removed and 5 new, at a median of $30/hr. Egocentric and wearable capture held at 136 roles and its median posted pay rose from $13 to $15 an hour. Teleoperation stood at 82, and robot evaluation fell from 11 to 8.

Each week we re-read the postings our pages cite. OpenTrain took down its US home robot pilot that paid $5 per approved hour and its workplace recording role that paid $8 to $12 an hour in nine countries, while its at-home recording roles still pay $14 to $15 an hour in US states and $6 in Latin America. micro1 closed its At-Work Video Recorder role for business owners, and its Japan at-home recorder now starts at $12 an hour.

TELUS Digital closed its remote robot teleoperator role, which paid $32 to $45 an hour and was open to any country. RoboForce lowered the floor of its Milpitas data collection operator posting to $25 an hour from $30 and closed its model evaluation operator role. New pay we added from employers' own postings: Scout AI drone pilots at $35 to $40 an hour, Saildrone uncrewed vessel pilots at $43.36 to $56.34 an hour and Droyd robot operators at $20 to $25.

Zipline raised $1.5 billion at a $21.5 billion valuation and Walmart agreed to add 300 Zipline drone delivery sites in the US. Defense autonomy company Shield AI is raising a $1 billion Series H at a $28.8 billion valuation to help pay for radar maker Echodyne. Humble Robotics, which builds self-driving electric freight vehicles with no cab, raised a $51 million Series A, and Paris start-up Physicl raised $10M for synthetic training data aimed at the cases where physical AI systems fail.

Agility Robotics, the maker of the Digit humanoid, began trading on Nasdaq on 5 November after its merger raised about $465 million before expenses. The full record is in our funding dataset.

Tesla opened robotaxi rides in San Antonio on 9 November, without saying whether its cars there carry human safety monitors. The FAA gave Skyways its first authorization for a drone to fly beyond the operator's sight from the US coast over the Gulf, carrying cargo from Shell's facility in Gibson, Louisiana, to an offshore platform, under a waiver rather than a new rule.

NHTSA opened a recall query into 2,895 Waymo vehicles to find out whether the software fix it made late in 2025 failed to stop its cars passing school buses with flashing red lights. More on where these fleets run is in our robotaxi and drone reports and our legal record.