Flywheel

Flywheel is a specialist recruitment company focused exclusively on talent acquisition for robotics, autonomy, and applied AI. The company operates as an embedded talent partner, working directly within hiring teams rather than functioning as a traditional vendor. Flywheel recruits for technical roles including perception engineers, controls leads, ML platform builders, ML research specialists, hardware engineers, and operational roles that support the development of intelligent machines. The company's entire operation is built around the robotics and AI category, with deep domain fluency in areas such as SLAM, visual-inertial odometry, foundation models, and behaviour cloning.

Flywheel specialises in recruiting across multiple technical disciplines within robotics and AI teams. The company's role taxonomy covers software and ML engineering (perception, CV, SLAM and localisation, sensor fusion, motion planning, controls, embedded firmware, ML research, applied ML, MLOps and evaluation, and simulation), hardware and product roles (mechatronics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, hardware operations, test and validation, robotics product management, and AI product management), and leadership positions (data operations, annotation leads, VP engineering, head of autonomy, and CTO roles). The company works with companies at various stages, from seed-stage startups through to Series-C funded robotics and applied AI businesses.

Flywheel operates across three geographies where robotics and AI talent concentrates: Austin serves as the US hub for seed-to-Series-C robotics and applied AI companies, with national sourcing across the Bay Area, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Seattle; Tokyo provides bilingual access to industrial robotics engineering talent from companies including Sony, Fanuc, Honda, and Preferred Networks; and Manila offers engineering-quality offshore capability for annotation operations, MLOps, data engineering, and robotics back-office functions at 50 to 70 per cent of US costs. The company's median time from engagement kickoff to first qualified candidate slate is seven days, supported by pre-built candidate networks and technical screening capabilities.