Head of Cognitive Robot Arms (human)

Your mission & challenges

• Product & business ownership: You own the product vision, strategy and roadmap for our robot arms across the entire lifecycle, from concept to series production, and you are accountable for their business success.

• Prioritization & backlog: You define, maintain and prioritize the product backlog in close alignment with Mechanical Engineering, Electronics and Software. You make clear trade-off decisions based on customer value, technical feasibility and business impact, and you stick to them.

• Leading in the matrix: You drive alignment across Hardware, Software, Sales and Business Development, translate technical complexity into clear product direction and create impact without formal authority.

• Market & customer insight: You continuously analyze market trends, customer feedback and competitive dynamics to guide product decisions and identify new opportunities in industrial automation, collaborative robotics and beyond.

• Go-to-market & certification: You co-lead product launches, define positioning and feature sets, and drive safety, regulatory and certification requirements at product level (e.g. CE, TÜV) together with Engineering and Quality.

• Traceable decisions: You document product decisions, assumptions and trade-offs cleanly, so they remain transparent and traceable across the matrix.

• Stakeholder communication: You report status, risks and priorities to the CEO and C-level, convey vision and story to investors, partners and customers, and represent the product at trade fairs and customer visits.

What we can look forward to

What you bring:

• Education: Degree in Engineering, Mechatronics, Robotics, Industrial Engineering or a comparable qualification.

• Product experience: 5–8+ years as Product Owner or Product Manager, ideally in robotics, automation or complex mechatronic systems, with a proven track record of taking hardware products through their full lifecycle to series production.

• Technical depth: Solid understanding of cobot mechanics, kinematics, sensor systems and industrial communication standards (e.g. EtherCAT, Profinet, IO-Link), deep enough to challenge the functions and judge trade-offs credibly.

• Safety & certification: Understanding of safety, regulatory and certification requirements at product level.

• Agile methods: Familiarity with Scrum or SAFe and tools such as Jira and Confluence.

• Matrix & stakeholder competence (as important as technical expertise): You know where decision rights lie in a “BU owns product, functions deliver execution” setup. You manage several stakeholders and competing priorities through transparent prioritization and expectation management, and you combine respect for experts and function logic with high standards for reliability.

• Decision strength: Entrepreneurial ownership. You prioritize, say no when needed and base decisions on data and customer needs instead of assumptions, without reopening them every day.

• Resilience: You stay effective under pressure in a fast-paced and often ambiguous environment.

• Communication: You are just as comfortable in detailed reviews with engineers as in status and risk reports for the CEO and C-level, and you write requirements, specifications and escalations with precision.

• Languages: Fluent English at a professional level; German is a plus.