1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Senior Product Manager Interview
Sarah Jenkins
This job is no longer available. Explore similar jobs
Location
onsite, Stuttgart, DE-BW, Germany
Commitment
Full Time
Level
Middle (2-4 years)
Sereact builds embodied AI for industrial robots - systems that sense, reason, and act in real warehouses and factories. We're a Series-B-stage robotics scaleup valued north of $400M, shipping deployments across Europe as fast as we can find the people to lead them.
The office isn't pretty. Desks look like crime scenes, screens get repurposed if you leave for a week, and the running joke is that the place looks like it has been robbed three times. Inside it, small teams of people who are genuinely the best at what they do, work absurd hours because they like the work and the company is going somewhere. It's a real startup, not a costumed one.
You're the person who shows up at a customer site after the hardware is bolted down and walks out 1-4 weeks later with a system running their live orders. That means PC and network setup, Docker configs, electrical debug, stereo camera and scanner calibration, gripper configuration, safety zones, API integration with the customer's host system, and ramp-up on real production volume, and fixing every issue that shows up while you are there. You're not doing all of it alone - the rest of the team backs you up from the office, and the SW engineer for your project is one call away. But onsite, you're the one bringing it to life.
Beyond the technical work, you own the customer relationship onsite. You build the operators' trust in the robot. You make the floor manager glad you're the one running the deployment. You hold your composure when the customer's CTO shows up for a chat for half an hour fishing for what's not working. You're the face of Sereact for the duration.
You've done this kind of work before. Three years or more deploying robotic or automation systems in industrial environments. You can read a wiring diagram, write enough Python or C++ to actually fix things, and you've spent real time on 6-axis arms. ROS 2, Docker, and at least one vision pipeline are closer to expected than nice-to-have.
More importantly: you like standing in the fire alone. When the SW team ships something broken, you're the one eating it onsite - and you fix it instead of escalating it. When the electrical contractor wired the cabinet wrong, you find it and redo it. When the customer is being difficult, you absorb it without poisoning the relationship. When SAT is tomorrow at 9am and the system still runs like shit at 11pm, you don't stop. If the drill holes for the controller are in the wrong place, you move the controller and drill new ones.
You're an expert communicator - with the SW engineer who's on call with you, with the customer's PM who's nervous, with the operator who's never seen one of these systems before. You document as you go. You spot process gaps and close them yourself instead of waiting for someone to assign it. High agency is your default mode.
You will get worked from every angle on this job. If you are the right person, you think "yes, that's the one I've been looking for."
Deployments typically run 1 to 4 weeks onsite, mostly across Europe. Weekends you're home (or in the office, if that's where you want to be). Between deployments you're in Stuttgart with the rest of the team or remoting in to support a live site or help out other departments.
a relaxed pace, a lean-back-35-hour week, a polished corporate environment, or the comfort of someone else owning the hard parts.