Delivery Robots Create New Jobs: Meet the Robot Wranglers

The robots that replaced Charlie Snodgrass' delivery gig just gave him a better job.

Snodgrass used to drive around Los Angeles delivering burritos and pad Thai for apps like Uber Eats. Now he's a robot wrangler, one of the first workers in a brand new profession created by the autonomous delivery boom.

His 5:45 a.m. shift starts in a West Hollywood warehouse where 150 identical delivery robots stand wheel to wheel, beeping and swooshing as they power up. Each robot wears a colored cone on top: green means ready to roll, orange means it needs tech support, pink means it's waiting for inspection.

Snodgrass has until 7:15 a.m. to check 27 robots and load them into a U-Haul for deployment across the city. He walks up to a bot named Singta and runs through his checklist: battery at 70%, no damage, food bin clean, software updated.

"Singta is on duty," the robot's display confirms.

These cute little bots need more help than you'd think. They get stuck in potholes, knocked over by winds, and confused by flooded streets. Last month, one got hit by a Waymo self-driving car in downtown LA. When heavy rains came, someone filmed a struggling bot and cheered, "She's doing her best!"

That's where wranglers come in. Serve Robotics, which operates 2,000 delivery bots in 20 cities, calls them "field operations executives." They clean sensors, swap batteries, rescue stuck robots, and train the AI to navigate real-world chaos.

Ali Kashani, Serve Robotics CEO, says these jobs will scale with the fleet. "If you build more robots, you're going to still have people whose job is to operate the fleet," he explained.

The industry is expanding fast. Competitor Coco Robotics plans to grow from 1,400 to 10,000 delivery robots by year's end. Serve recently acquired Moxi, a hospital assistant bot that delivers supplies with actual arms.

The Ripple Effect

Public job postings for "robot technicians" jumped 75% in 2025 compared to the previous year. The median salary sits at $64,000, though wrangling positions like Snodgrass' pay $24 to $26 an hour—about $54,000 annually at the top end.

Companies like Instawork, a staffing platform for blue-collar jobs, are building large pools of trained wranglers to meet demand. "It's really impossible to roll these things out without humans," said CEO Sumir Meghani.

The growth extends beyond delivery bots. Self-driving cars from Waymo and Zoox, walking robots with two or four legs, and independent robot arms heading to workplaces and homes all need caretakers.

Whether these jobs multiply as fast as the robots remains uncertain. Companies won't share their human-to-robot ratios, and Amazon reportedly plans to avoid hiring 500,000 people through automation by 2033.

But for now, the robots rolling through our streets are creating real opportunities for workers like Snodgrass—people who lost jobs to automation and found new ones keeping those same machines running.