Safety-critical Director (ISO 10218)

Role summary

You will join at the moment when the hard robotics questions become real product decisions: how do we turn customer needs into a highly capable robotic hand that is reliable, manufacturable, and ready to deploy on a real shop floor?

Responsibilities

As Head of Product at TACTILIA, you will be the operational backbone of our product development. You will turn customer requirements into a robust roadmap — and the roadmap into a product that reaches the customer on time, on budget and at production quality.

You will lead through structure, clarity and commitment rather than hierarchy, and report to the CTO. You will work across product development, engineering and customer needs, keeping priorities aligned as TACTILIA moves from development towards production and scale.

• Own the product roadmap. Turn customer and market needs into clear product priorities and continuously balance customer value, engineering effort, technical risk, and time-to-market.
• Turn requirements into product decisions. Work with Applications and customers to translate needs into clear, testable specifications, maintaining traceability from RFQ through validation.
• Orchestrate product development. Coordinate Mechatronics, Software, Electronics, Systems Engineering and Applications across milestones, dependencies and interfaces, resolving conflicting priorities when needed.
• Drive the product to production. Own development milestones, gate reviews, budget, unit cost and quality through to production readiness, while helping establish a scalable product development process.
• Make the hard trade-offs. Bring together customer needs, technical feasibility, cost, quality and schedule to make pragmatic decisions and keep development moving.
• Stay close to customers. Support the CTO in technical customer discussions, feasibility assessments, RFQs, trade fairs and partner conversations, bringing market feedback back into the product.
• Build the organisation around the product. Identify gaps in capacity, skills and ownership across engineering, translate them into concrete hiring needs, and make pragmatic make-or-buy decisions.
• Build for the real world. Work with engineering and operations to ensure the product is not only technically capable, but manufacturable, testable, reliable and ready to scale.

Requirements

• A degree in Mechatronics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a comparable technical field.
• 7+ years of experience developing complex mechatronic or hardware products, including significant experience in product development or technical project/programme management.
• A proven track record taking products from requirements through development to production readiness.
• Strong requirements management and a solid understanding of systems engineering.
• Experience leading complex, multidisciplinary teams without direct line authority.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to balance customer needs, technical feasibility, cost, quality and time-to-market.
• A hands-on, structured approach and the ability to move between strategic decisions and day-to-day execution.
• Fluent English; German is a strong plus.

Nice to have

• Experience in robotics, drive technology, gripping technology, or other highly integrated mechatronic systems.
• Experience in a startup or scale-up environment, or a corporate spin-off.
• Familiarity with relevant robotics, machinery or functional safety standards.

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 they need to interact with the physical world at industrial scale.

The technology is taking shape. The team is being built. And the standards for robotic hands and their skills are still wide open.

Find more English Speaking Jobs in Germany on Arbeitnow