Centific Hiring! Full Time Project Manager - Physical AI Lab - Research in Pulau Pinang - Ricebowl

Position Title : Project Manager - Physical AI Lab & Research

Work Location : Georgetown, Penang

Working Hours : Mon - Fri, Regular Office Hours

Employment Type : Permanent

About The Role

The Project Manager, Robotics Lab & Research keeps the Physical AI Center of Excellence (PACE) moving by tracking progress, surfacing blockers, and managing timeline and scope across new lab and research initiatives — teleoperation, data collection, annotation, and model evaluation for robotics. The role serves as the single source of truth for the status of each initiative — what is on track, what is at risk, and what needs a decision. While the role does not own the technical execution, it is responsible for visibility, coordination, and accountability across a multi-geography, multi-discipline team (hardware, simulation, data pipeline, and real-world evaluation), ensuring initiatives are scoped clearly, tracked consistently, and delivered on time.

Key Responsibilities

• Track progress on all new robotics lab and research initiatives, maintaining a live view of status, milestones, and completion against plan.
• Define and manage scope for each initiative; control scope changes as work evolves.
• Build and maintain timelines and roadmaps across concurrent initiatives; keep target dates realistic and current.
• Identify, log, and highlight blockers early — technical, hardware/procurement, staffing, or dependency-related — and drive them to resolution or escalation.
• Run a regular reporting and status cadence (weekly updates, dashboards, standups) so leadership and contributors always know where things stand.
• Flag timeline slips, scope creep, and resource gaps to the practice owner and stakeholders, with clear options and recommended next steps.
• Track hardware procurement and vendor timelines (including cross-border shipping, customs, and tariffs) as initiative dependencies.
• Maintain a risk and dependency register; keep mitigation actions assigned and moving.
• Drive initiative closure — confirm deliverables met scope, capture documentation, and hand off to research and delivery teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree (BA/BS) in Engineering, Robotics, Computer Science, Business, or a related field.
• Minimum 5 years of experience in project or program management, ideally in robotics, hardware, R&D, or industrial automation.
• Strong hands-on experience with project tracking and reporting tools (project trackers, roadmaps, dashboards) and Microsoft Office 365 / Power BI.
• Working knowledge of robotics and AI workflows, including hardware-software integration, teleoperation, data collection, simulation, or model evaluation, with sufficient technical understanding to identify dependencies and blockers.
• Proactive at surfacing risks and blockers before they slip; comfortable chasing updates and escalating when needed.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to summarize complex technical status clearly for leadership and partners.
• Highly organized, detail-oriented, and able to work independently across cross-functional teams.
• Professional certification (PMP, PgMP) preferred.

Critical Skillset

• Progress tracking and status reporting across multiple concurrent initiatives.
• Scope definition and change control.
• Timeline and roadmap management.
• Blocker identification, escalation, and risk/dependency management.