The posting
DIRECTOR SERVICE ACCOUNTS @ SEREACT 🦾
Director Service Accounts (m/f/d) · Stuttgart, with frequent travel to customer sites across Europe · Reports to the VP Operations · Full-time
WHO WE ARE
Sereact builds the robot brain for physical work. Cortex, our vision-language-action foundation model, is hardware-agnostic: the same model runs single-arm and dual-arm systems and mobile manipulators that pick, sort and handle returns in live production across Europe and the US. Customers include Zalando, IKEA, BMW, Rohlik and DHL.
Founded in 2021 in Stuttgart, with an R&D hub in Zurich and a US office in Boston. We have raised more than $145 million, most recently a Series B led by Headline, with Zalando as a strategic investor. We work in small, senior teams with a flat structure; execution counts more than titles.
WHY THIS ROLE, WHY NOW
The Site Acceptance Test is where a deployment ends and a customer’s operation begins. From that day our robots pick in someone else’s building, every shift, against targets the customer measures. Many of our customers buy Sereact as a service: they pay for robots that work, not for robots that were delivered.
Our deployments are growing from single robots to fleets, and the site that performs is the site that grows. We now want one leader who owns every live site from SAT on: keeps it at target, brings it everything we ship in software and hardware, speaks for the customer inside Sereact, and turns a working site into a growing one.
THE REAL-WORLD LEARNING LOOP RUNS THROUGH YOUR SITES
Cortex learns from live deployments. Every station at a customer is part of that loop, so a station that is down is more than a service problem: a cell sitting dark is a stopped sensor.
- In-Situ Policy Execution. Every live station runs the current policy in a real operation. Your surface on it: each site at target, every shift.
- Continuous Data Acquisition. Robots annotate their own work while they run. Your surface on it: stations that run and stay connected, so the data keeps coming.
- Data Curation and Learning. Failures and edge cases decide what Cortex learns next. Your surface on it: what your sites tell us reaches engineering and research with the context they need.
- Evaluation and Policy Redeployment. Updated policies pass validation gates before they return to the fleet. Your surface on it: they land in your customers’ operations on a schedule the customer can plan around, with a way back if something is off.
A site that runs well teaches Cortex more, and it grows.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Take over every site at SAT. Set the standard for what a site needs before your team takes it on: documentation, open points, spare parts, contacts and targets. If a site is not ready, it stays with deployment until it is.
- Keep every site at target. Own each site’s performance against its contract: availability, throughput and pick success. See a problem coming before the customer does, and run the recovery plan when a site falls behind.
- Run planned change. Software releases and model updates reach customer operations in a rhythm customers can plan around: release notes, change windows, blackout periods, validation on site and a rollback path.
- Run hardware updates and retrofits across the installed base, from new gripper generations to station upgrades and fixes, with Hardware Engineering and the field teams, without stopping the customer’s operation.
- Get every site ready for peak: hypercare and coverage plans for the weeks that matter most to our customers, from Black Friday to the January returns wave.
- Be the customer’s advocate inside Sereact. Bring their priorities into product, R&D, hardware and operations, make sure what we promised at SAT holds, and own the customer communication when something goes wrong.
- Take each site from SAT to expansion with Strategic Accounts: the performance evidence, the site capacity and the technical plan for the next stations. Strategic Accounts own the contract; you make the expansion ready to happen.
- Report site health customers trust: one view of every site, monthly performance reports and the operational part of every business review.
- Build and lead the Service Accounts team: Service Account Managers who each own a portfolio of live sites, and a playbook that still works when the installed base is ten times larger.
- Work hand in hand with Deployment, Technical Support & Field Service, Hardware Engineering, R&D and Strategic Accounts, so a live site gets one coordinated answer, not five.
NOT IN SCOPE, BY DESIGN
- Deployment up to SAT stays with our deployment teams. You set the bar for what you take over.
- Incidents, the support desk, field technicians and spare parts logistics stay with Technical Support & Field Service. You own the site; they own the ticket.
- Contracts, pricing and the expansion deal itself stay with Strategic Accounts. You make the case; they sign it.
- Product and hardware design stay with engineering. You bring them what the field needs.
WHAT MAKES THIS ROLE HARD
- Every change to a live operation is a risk, and not changing is a risk too: the fleet only gets better if updates reach it. You make both safe.
- Our robots work in other people’s buildings: their WMS, their conveyors, their shift patterns, their peak. Much of what decides a site’s performance is not ours, and it is still your problem.
- You sit between the customer and our teams. Sometimes the customer’s priority is not ours. You argue for it, or you explain honestly why not.
- The installed base grows faster than any team. What works by heroics today breaks at ten times the size.
YOUR FIRST 12 MONTHS
- First 90 days: know every live site and its people; one named owner, one health view and a clear status against target for each; a handover standard at SAT agreed with deployment.
- By month 6: releases and retrofits in a rhythm customers can plan around; peak season run on hypercare plans; account plans with Strategic Accounts for the largest customers; the first Service Account Managers hired.
- By month 12: every site at target or on a dated recovery plan; expansions coming out of the installed base; a playbook ready to take to the US.
WHAT YOU BRING
- 8+ years owning live installations of complex automation after go-live (warehouse automation, intralogistics, robotics or comparable 24/7 systems), as service account manager, technical account manager, customer success or service delivery lead, including at least three years leading a team.
- You did it while the installed base grew from tens to hundreds of sites, and you built the processes rather than inheriting them.
- Technical enough to read a log, follow a root cause and hold your own with engineers. Commercial enough to sit with a customer’s operations director and talk performance, cost and growth.
- You have run releases, upgrades and retrofit programs in live operations without stopping them.
- Customers trust you because you tell them early and you tell them straight.
- Fluent English and German; another European language is a plus.
- You are happy to spend a large part of your week at customer sites.
Nice to have: subscription or Robotics-as-a-Service models · goods-to-person and AS/RS integrations · e-commerce, returns or grocery fulfilment · experience in both a scale-up and an established automation vendor.
Not the right fit: account management without technical depth, or running a ticket queue without ever owning a customer.
THREE QUESTIONS WE WILL ASK YOU
1. Tell us about a live site that fell behind its targets. What did you change in the first two weeks, and how did it end?
2. A customer’s peak starts in four weeks. Engineering wants to ship a model update and a gripper retrofit before then. What do you do?
3. How do you know a site is about to grow, or about to leave, before the customer tells you?
WHAT WE OFFER
- A fleet in live production that grows every month, and the mandate to build the team that keeps it at target.
- A key role in the operations leadership of a company scaling from Europe into the US, with equity.
- Travel, accommodation and meals covered when you are on site.
- Our HQ in Stuttgart, with teams in Zurich and Boston.
HOW WE HIRE
Conversations with our VP Operations and the founders, a working session on a real case from one of our live sites, and time with the team in Stuttgart. We move fast.
