Flywheel

Flywheel is a recruitment firm that describes itself as an embedded talent partner for robotics, autonomy and applied machine learning teams. It hires perception engineers, controls leads, ML platform builders and the operators who scale them, across the US, Japan and the Philippines. It began as a generalist recruiting firm covering software, finance, sales and operations. It now says every recruiter on its specialist desk works exclusively in robotics, autonomy and applied AI, and that its generalist book is closed to new clients.

Its services are embedded recruitment process outsourcing, retained search, fractional leadership, and an offshore service called Global Talent @Scale. The offshore service hires and manages engineers and operators in Manila for work such as annotation, MLOps and data engineering, which it says costs 50 to 70 per cent of US equivalents. It works with companies from pre-seed humanoid startups to public industrial robotics firms.

Flywheel has offices in San Francisco, Austin, Tokyo and Manila. Austin is its headquarters, Tokyo is its Asia headquarters, and the Tokyo team recruits bilingually for Japan's industrial robotics market.