Figure AI is advertising a night-shift coordinator job in Santa Clara that pays $40 to $45 an hour to keep its humanoid robots running while most people sleep. The contract-to-hire role runs from 10:30 p.m. to 7 a.m., five days a week including a weekend shift, according to a job posting reported by Business Insider. The coordinator would schedule and coach operators, assign robots to tasks, troubleshoot failures and safety issues, and at times operate the machines directly.
The work is physical. The posting says the coordinator must stand for most of an eight-hour shift and be able to lift, carry and maneuver equipment or humanoid hardware weighing up to 50 pounds, and must make decisions when engineering support is thin. "You'll be the one making the calls," the ad states. It is not the only human role Figure is filling to keep its fleet working: the company is also hiring operators to test and validate new robot behaviors and skills.
The detail sits awkwardly against Figure's own pitch. The company, founded in 2022, says on its website that it targets jobs humans do not want, starting in manufacturing, logistics, warehousing and retail, and that "over time, humans could leave the loop altogether as robots become capable of building other robots." For now, the robots still need a person on site overnight to reset them when they fail. The gap between that promise and a $45-an-hour babysitting shift is the story the listing tells.
The hiring comes amid a surge of money into the field. Robotics and physical AI companies raised $33.4 billion worldwide in the first half of 2026, according to PitchBook, already above the $28.7 billion raised in all of 2025 and far beyond the roughly $5 billion of 2020. Figure said in September 2025 it was valued at $39 billion after a $1 billion Series C led by Parkway Venture Capital. Last week, as AI Daily reported, rival Agility Robotics began trading on Nasdaq after a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, one of the first US humanoid makers to go public.
What the posting does not settle is how far today's humanoids are from the autonomy their makers describe. The requirement for an overnight human to coach operators, clear faults and physically move hardware suggests the machines remain brittle in real commercial use, and that labor savings are still offset by the people needed to supervise them. Whether that ratio improves fast enough to justify valuations like Figure's is the question investors are paying to answer.