Business Development & Key Account Manager

About TACTILIA:

At TACTILIA, we are building the industry-ready robotic hand that closes one of the biggest gaps in Physical AI. Spun out of SCHUNK, the global market leader in gripping technology, we combine a decade of robotic-hand expertise and real industrial access with the speed and ambition of a deep-tech startup.

This isn't a research project waiting for its first customer. We already have a product, customers are ready to use it, and we are launching now. Your work will directly shape the electronics, actuators, and embedded systems that make that possible.

You will join at the moment when the hard engineering questions become real product decisions: how do we make a highly capable robotic hand reliable, manufacturable, serviceable, and simple enough to deploy on a real shop floor?

The Role:

As Business Development & Key Account Manager you will drive TACTILIA's commercial growth across selected industrial sectors, developing key customer relationships and turning market opportunities into business.

Working closely with our leadership and product teams, you will execute the go-to-market strategy within your assigned industries and accounts. This is a hands-on, customer-facing role focused on developing new business, managing key accounts, leading customer discussions, preparing offers, negotiating deals and driving opportunities through to closure.

You will act as the commercial interface between customers and internal teams, ensuring customer needs are translated into concrete business opportunities and actionable next steps.

What you will do:

• Drive sales across assigned industries: Develop and grow customer relationships within selected verticals

• Own key customer accounts: Build trusted relationships with relevant stakeholders, from engineering and R&D leaders to business unit heads, management and procurement.

• Manage the full sales process: Take ownership from initial customer contact and opportunity qualification through discussions, product presentations, technical evaluations, quotations, negotiations and deal closure.

• Develop new business opportunities: Proactively identify potential customers, initiate conversations, build a strong pipeline and convert opportunities into concrete projects and commercial agreements.

• Lead customer discussions: Understand customer applications, challenges and requirements, and position TACTILIA's robotic hand as a relevant solution for their specific use cases.

• Drive commercial execution: Prepare and follow up on proposals, quotations and offers, coordinate internal resources and ensure that opportunities progress in a structured and timely manner.

• Coordinate technical and commercial discussions: Work closely with engineering, product management and leadership to align customer expectations with product capabilities, feasibility and development priorities.

• Represent TACTILIA externally: Build the company's presence within your industry through customer visits, industry events, trade fairs and relevant networks.

• Provide market and customer insights: Bring structured feedback on customer needs, competitive developments and industry trends back to the leadership and product teams to support strategic and product decisions.

• Build long-term partnerships: Develop relationships with OEMs, system integrators and other relevant industry players to establish TACTILIA as a trusted technology partner.
  

What you bring:

• 5+ years of experience in B2B sales, key account management or business development, ideally within an industrial, automotive, defense, robotics or automation environment.

• A strong understanding of your respective industry, including its customer landscape, decision-making structures, commercial processes, and relevant stakeholders.

• A proven track record of developing customer relationships, managing complex sales cycles, and successfully closing commercial deals.

• Experience selling technically demanding products, industrial hardware or engineering solutions to established organizations.

• The ability to engage confidently with experienced technical and business stakeholders, understand their challenges, and turn discussions into concrete commercial opportunities.

• Strong negotiation, presentation, and communication skills, combined with a pragmatic and solution-oriented mindset.

• A structured and hands-on approach to sales execution, including pipeline management, opportunity tracking, proposal preparation and consistent follow-up.

• The ability to work cross-functionally with product, engineering and management teams in a fast-moving startup environment.

• A high level of ownership, persistence and commercial drive. You know how to move things forward and get deals done.

• Fluent German and English, both written and spoken.

Bonus:

• Familiarity with robotics, Physical AI, humanoids or dexterous manipulation.

• Experience in a startup or scale-up environment, ideally within a technically complex product organization.

The next chapter of robotics won't be built in a lab. It will be built by people who care about what happens when technology meets the real world.

At TACTILIA, you'll work on one of the hardest open problems in robotics: giving machines the dexterity, reliability and robustness to interact with the physical world at industrial scale.

The technology is taking shape, the team is being built, and the standards around robotic hands and their skills are still open. That means your decisions will have a lasting impact — not just on a product, but on what comes next for Physical AI.

Build the hand. Define the standard. Shape what comes next.

If you're excited by the challenge of building robotic hands that works reliably in the real world, we'd love to hear from you.