Program Manager — Delivery & EU Grants

Summary

We need someone who can do two genuinely hard things in parallel: drive delivery against our roadmaps and release plans — in close partnership with our Head of Engineering and our hardware and software product management leads — so we ship what we said we’d ship, when we said we’d ship it; and own EIC Accelerator grant compliance and reporting — work packages, deliverables, milestones, interim/final reports, audit prep, financial reporting coordination — and find creative, defensible ways to align our actual execution with the grant project plan when business reality and the application diverge. (It always diverges. The skill is in the reconciliation.)

Both halves reduce to the same underlying mode: someone who keeps things moving, drafts the narrative that connects what we did to what we said, and unblocks problems instead of escalating them. There’s a third dimension that matters too: we want someone who shows up with opinions. Not someone who just shepherds the roadmap, but someone who’s curious about why we’re building what we’re building, has views on hardware and software product direction, and isn’t shy about pushing back when something doesn’t make sense. The best PMs we’ve worked with all start as “the PM” and end up as “the person whose opinion the founders ask for first.” That arc is explicitly welcome here.

About HeyCharge

HeyCharge makes EV charging work in places it was never supposed to — underground garages, multi-tenant buildings, and any other concrete-and-rebar environment where cellular signal goes to die. Our offline-first SecureCharge platform uses Bluetooth for local session authentication and Zigbee mesh for inter-charger load management and cloud sync. No internet required at the charger; no compromise on reliability or billing accuracy.

We’re Munich-headquartered with team members across Germany, Ukraine, and the US, selling into property managers, utilities, and OEMs across Europe, the US, and Latin America. Our partners include Vonovia (Europe’s largest residential landlord), Easee and Emobi. We’re backed by Y Combinator and EU innovation funding, with a culture that’s Google-rooted on engineering, AI-first and automation-first on operations, and allergic to bureaucracy that doesn’t earn its keep.

Responsibilities

• Delivery against the product and engineering roadmap. Run the cadence. Hold the line on commitments. Partner closely with the Head of Engineering and hardware/software product management leads to translate roadmap intent into shipped releases. Make sure dependencies surface before they become incidents.
• EIC Accelerator grant program management. WP/deliverable tracking, milestone management, interim and final reporting, coordination with our financial controller for cost reporting, audit and review preparation. You are the operational owner of our relationship with the EIC Programme Manager.
• Customer pilot and rollout delivery. Vonovia, Emobi, and the next ones. Coordinate hardware availability, installation timelines, software readiness, and customer-side dependencies into something resembling a plan.
• Risk, dependency, and decision tracking. Lightweight, fit for our stage. We don’t need a 40-tab risk register; we need someone who knows what’s actually on fire.
• Process design — only where it earns its keep. We will gladly adopt structure that reduces coordination cost. We will not adopt structure for its own sake.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in program/project/delivery management roles, ideally including time in a scaleup or a startup that actually had to ship things (Series A through C). Pure enterprise or pure 5-person seed-stage backgrounds won’t translate well.
• Direct experience managing EU-funded grant programs (EIC Accelerator, Horizon Europe, EUREKA, BMWK, or similar). You know what a Periodic Report looks like, you’ve herded financial data into Form C, you’ve survived at least one review meeting.
• Hands-on operator. You write the doc, you send the email, you chase the signature. You don’t wait for a coordinator-of-the-coordinators.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and gaps between plan and reality. When the project plan says “deliver X by Q3” and engineering pivoted to Y in Q2 because the customer asked for it, your instinct is to construct the narrative bridge — not to file a change request and wait for a steering committee.
• Opinions about product, and the energy to argue for them. You don’t have to come from a product role, but you have views on what makes good hardware and good software, and you’re not shy about telling us when our roadmap is missing the point. You sit in on engineering discussions because you want to, not because you have to.
• Excellent written communication in English. German is a strong plus, especially for working with German customers, the BMWK ecosystem, and our auditors.
• Comfortable working with technical teams. You don’t need to write code, but you need to read a roadmap, a schematic block diagram, or an API spec without panicking.

Bonus Points

• Hardware product or embedded systems delivery experience.
• Direct product management experience, even if it’s not your primary background — time as a PM, a TPM, an engineering lead with product responsibilities, or a founder who had to wear the product hat.
• Background in EV charging, energy, mobility, or proptech.
• Familiarity with our stack-adjacent tools: GitLab, Notion, n8n, GCP/BigQuery, Stripe.
• You’ve worked in or around automotive Tier 1 and a startup, and can articulate what each environment teaches you and where each one fails.
• German B2/C1.

Personal Characteristics

• Ownership mentality: You take responsibility and see things through without being asked twice.
• Hands-on and pragmatic: You’d rather solve a problem than write a memo about it. You write the doc, you send the email, you chase the signature.
• Strategic yet hands-on: Equally comfortable thinking about product direction and chasing down the last open work-package deliverable.
• Adaptable: You’re comfortable with ambiguity and the gaps between plan and reality — operations means many small things, not one big thing.

Who this role is not for

We’re being upfront because it saves everyone time:

• If your view of program management is primarily a science — frameworks, methodologies, certifications, metrics for their own sake — and you don’t want to engage with the underlying engineering and product decisions, this is the wrong environment. We want a partner with opinions, not an administrator with a Gantt chart.
• If your strongest professional muscle is process compliance and gate management, you’ll be unhappy here within 90 days.
• If your default response to ambiguity is to escalate, document the risk, and wait for instructions, this is the wrong environment.
• If you need a fully defined org chart, a written methodology, and a steering committee before you can act — this is the wrong environment.
• If you need a team of analysts or program coordinators around you before you can produce results, this isn’t the right stage. You ARE the PM team for the first 12–18 months — writing the report yourself, chasing the financial data yourself, running the audit prep yourself. The team comes after the function is proven.
• If “find creative ways to align execution against the EIC project plan when gaps emerge” sounds like an invitation to commit fraud rather than a skilled act of professional narrative construction, we’re not on the same page. We’re not asking anyone to fudge numbers or misrepresent results — we’re asking for someone who understands that grant agreements describe an intended journey and the reporting needs to credibly map the actual journey onto it.

Closing

If you’ve spent the last few years drafting the narrative that turns “what we actually did” into a credible Periodic Report, and you’ve been quietly wishing the product strategy meeting upstream of you was a meeting you got to weigh in on — we’d love to talk. Bring your opinions.