Dogtooth is recruiting a manager to be responsible for hardware uptime across its installed base of robots, infrastructure and ancillary equipment at customer and trial sites. The robotics operations manager would report to the Director of Operations and sit between the company's production team and the farms that use its machines. The company says it is scaling its on-farm operations to a growing number of customers in the UK and internationally.
A role built around uptime
The job description frames the position around keeping deployed equipment working to a defined standard. The post covers robots, the infrastructure around them and supporting kit, across both paying customer sites and trial sites.
Dogtooth lists five outcomes the manager must secure. Robot deployments must be delivered to customer satisfaction, to current standards, on time and within budget. Equipment must be kept at standard. Equipment must be updated through the company's Change Management process as improvements are made. Improvement opportunities must be identified, defined and quantified so they can enter that process. Staff at customer and distributor organisations must be trained to carry out agreed repair, refurbishment and upgrade work.
The last item shows how Dogtooth expects to support its machines as the customer base grows. Some of the repair and upgrade work is meant to be done by people outside the company, in customer and distributor teams, with the operations manager responsible for training them.
Duties from maintenance to cost modelling
The listed duties are mostly maintenance and deployment work. The manager must provide reactive maintenance in time to meet equipment availability targets, which means triaging reported issues and setting priorities. The manager must also design and deliver preventative maintenance programmes and keep equipment at the current standard so that picking is safe and effective.
The manager is also expected to act as the technical managerial authority on a defined set of subsystems: Wifi, electrical installation, batteries, layout, a spares kanban supermarket, cloud, and rows and rails. The list shows how much of a farm robot's reliability depends on site infrastructure as well as on the robot itself.
New deployments fall to the same person. The manager must make sure each one is correctly surveyed and defined, resourced and project managed to delivery, on time and within budget. The manager also provides technical training at levels the posting calls L1 and L2, and operates the Change Management process.
One duty is financial. The manager is to develop and monitor a model for the cost of Dogtooth's operations, which is meant to support budgeting and the ranking of improvement priorities. The role also covers reporting, root cause analysis and countermeasure delivery where performance falls short.
Working relationships and performance measures
The manager works closely with the Customer Success Manager and with the Commercial Manager on new deployments. The manager works with the Production Engineer and the Purchasing Manager so that new and return-to-base equipment arrives in time, and with the Field Engineer on input to, and adoption of, changes. The manager also works with farmers and their teams and supervises technicians who carry out work on customer sites.
Dogtooth runs daily management, and the manager is expected to attend and support the Ops Daily Management meeting on equipment availability issues. The posting names the measures the role contributes to: daily picking information by site, covering safety and three productivity measures; regular measurement of field operations; mean time between failures; mean time to repair; first time fix rate; spares availability on customer sites; and the time taken to implement change notes to standard. It also lists Policy Deployment Level 1 measures as reported by the COO, and an OOBQ measure for the Director of Operations. The posting does not define OOBQ or give target values for any of the measures.
The desirable profile is pragmatic. Dogtooth wants someone who can balance running an existing process with improving it, and who has operations management experience. Experience in agriculture, horticulture, agritech or food production is listed as desirable. So are an aptitude for practical work, a willingness to travel and a full driving licence.
Dogtooth offers a company pension, 25 days of holiday pro rata and share options. It describes itself as a recently funded start-up and says the options let employees benefit from the company's success.
What the hire signals, and what it does not
The posting is not a product announcement, and it gives no figures for fleet size, uptime or customer count. Its value is in what it shows about where Dogtooth thinks the difficulty lies. The company is hiring for reliability and field support. The measures it lists, mean time between failures, mean time to repair and first time fix rate, are standard ways to track how often equipment fails and how quickly it is restored. Placing them next to picking safety and productivity by site ties machine health directly to the work the robots do for farmers.
The scope of the role also points to a wider issue in agricultural robotics. The manager's remit includes Wifi, electrical installation, batteries, layout, cloud and rows and rails. A robot on a farm depends on all of these, and a failure in any of them stops picking. A company that sells robots to growers therefore has to manage a site as a system, and the job description treats it that way. The training of customer and distributor staff to perform L1 and L2 work suggests Dogtooth does not plan to send its own staff to every fault as the number of sites grows.
Several things remain unproven from the text alone. The posting sets no availability targets, so there is no way to judge what uptime Dogtooth considers acceptable or whether it is reaching it. It does not say how many technicians the manager will supervise or how many sites the manager will cover. It does not show whether distributor-led repair works in practice. The Change Management process is named but not described, so how quickly field lessons reach the hardware is unknown. The cost-of-operations model is also still to be built. Until Dogtooth publishes service data, the hire shows intent to professionalise support, not proof that deployed robots meet customers' needs.
The comparison with other field robotics companies is limited by the same lack of data. A senior operations post with this breadth, covering deployment, maintenance, training, cost modelling and change control, indicates that Dogtooth sees field operations as a function in its own right, separate from production and engineering. How well that function performs will show up in the measures the posting already names.
