Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe’s startup Mind Robotics announced the appointment of Doug Field as president in a major coup for the CEO’s secretive robotics project.

Field was a VP of special projects at Apple, where he was the de facto head of the company’s ultimately unsuccessful Project Titan effort to make an autonomous electric car. He had a previous stint at Apple as VP of Mac hardware engineering, but he left the company in 2013 to become Tesla’s chief vehicle engineer, where he helped oversee the Model 3 sedan. He left Tesla in 2018 and rejoined Apple. In 2021, Field was hired by Ford to run the automaker’s electric vehicle and software division, a position he held until earlier this year.

Mind Robotics said Field will oversee its effort to build “universally capable robots” for the purpose of working in Rivian’s factories, as well as other applications. The startup was founded by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe in 2025, and has since raised over $1 billion in financing. While the company has yet to show off any of its robots in public, the startup says its robots are being designed with “dexterity and physical reasoning” that’s required for industrial work.

“Doug is a remarkable leader with a track record of delivering new technologies in successful products, and I couldn’t be more excited to be building Mind with him,” Scaringe said in a statement. “He has an incredible ability to foster great teams that take on big, complex ideas and deliver products that reset expectations. That’s exactly what Mind needs as we deploy robots into real factories and beyond.”

Field joins Mind Robotics at a major turning point for the field of robotics, with rapid advances in physical AI colliding with major hurdles in hardware and software development. Several companies, like Tesla and Hyundai, are pursuing humanoid robots for factory and warehouse work — even as experts note that making a robot act like a human is easier than scaling the technology for practical work. Mind Robotics hasn’t confirmed whether it’s working on a humanoid design or something else entirely. The company has been on a hiring spree and currently has 32 open positions.

Scaringe, who serves as acting CEO and chair of Mind Robotics, has said he wants to keep the companies separate, rather than try to combine the work like Tesla. That said, the companies are certainly linked in several ways. Mind Robotics is using AI training data from Rivian, and the robots will be initially tested in Rivian’s factories. Rivian also owns equity in Mind Robotics and will be the first customer for its robots.

Field said he is excited for the challenge in running the new startup.

“Integrating AI and robotics is one of the most important—and difficult—engineering challenges of our time,” he said in a statement. “Mind has assembled an exceptional team and has a unique advantage: the ability to deploy and learn inside a real, high-volume factory from day one. I’m thrilled to join RJ in building a team, culture, and technology that will redefine what we can make in America.”

Correction October 13th: Mind Robotics is a partner of Rivian, but not a spinoff. A previous version of this story misstated the relationship between the companies.