Technical Product Manager — Platform

Summary

We’re looking for a Technical Product Manager to own HeyCharge’s core platform — the system that delivers charger access via cryptographic tokens carried by users running our mobile app, and the full vertical stack behind it: backend services, mobile SDK, and the chargers themselves. It’s the patented offline-first technology that makes SecureCharge possible, and it’s the product surface that every other HeyCharge product plugs into.

The platform ships in two shapes, and you own both. First, as a standalone embedded product for charger OEMs and CPOs who want to run our technology in white-label form — they take the SDK, integrate our auth model, and ship their hardware with HeyCharge’s offline-capable platform inside. Second, as a turnkey CPMS — mobile apps plus backend — for CPOs who want a “just works” product under the HeyCharge brand. Your day-1 stakeholder is our internal CPO division (HeyCharge-Operated): they are your first and most demanding customer, and the platform you build for them is what we generalize for everyone else.

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

• Platform roadmap. Own the product roadmap across the full vertical — backend services, mobile SDK, charger-side firmware product surface — and the productized forms it ships in (embedded SDK + turnkey CPMS).
• HeyCharge-Operated as customer. Treat our internal CPO division as your first customer. Sit with them. Understand what slows them down. Build the platform that lets them deliver charging-as-a-service at scale.
• External productization. Define the embedded white-label SDK product for OEM and CPO partners — packaging, integration surface, support model. Define the turnkey CPMS product for CPOs who want our brand and our operations.
• API and SDK design. Own the developer-facing surface — how the SDK gets integrated, what the mobile and backend APIs expose, how documentation reads. The developer experience is product.
• Cross-stack shipping. Partner with the Head of Engineering, backend, mobile, and embedded teams to ship integrated platform releases. Hold the line on scope, sequence, and what gets cut.
• External technical inputs. Translate requirements from OEM and CPO partners (and from the OCPP and charging-protocol ecosystem) into concrete product decisions.
• Energy partnership. Partner closely with our Technical Product Manager — Energy Services to make the platform a fit substrate for energy features (V2G/V2H, demand response, dynamic tariffs) that span SecureCharge Module, CONNECT, mobile, SDK, backend, and web.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in technical product management, with at least 2-3 owning a developer-facing platform, SDK, or API product.
• Strong technical fluency across at least two of: backend services, mobile (iOS / Android), embedded firmware. You can read a protocol spec, an API definition, and a mobile SDK header without panicking.
• Demonstrated experience designing products that serve both internal customers (an ops team, a service business) and external customers (developers, partners, OEMs) — and managing the tension between the two.
• Authentication, identity, or cryptography product experience — you understand what a session token is, what a signed message proves, and what happens when key provisioning goes wrong at the factory.
• Excellent written communication in English. German is a plus but not required.
• Comfort with ambiguity at the boundary between “this is a product feature” and “this is a service that ops handles” — and the judgment to know which one this quarter’s problem is.

Bonus Points

• Direct experience with OCPP 1.6 / 2.0.1 or CPMS / charge-point-management-system products.
• Background in white-label or embedded products consumed by OEMs / device manufacturers.
• Mobile SDK product experience on iOS, Android, or React Native.
• BLE, Zigbee, or proximity-authentication product experience.
• Direct experience working with an internal operations team as a first-party customer.
• Engineering background — you’ve written code or shipped firmware in previous lives.

Personal Characteristics

• Builder mindset — you create order, structure, and systems that make life easier; you reach for the API spec before the slide deck.
• Ownership mentality — you take responsibility for what the platform does in the wild, including the parts ops calls you about at 9 PM.
• Hands-on and pragmatic — you’d rather solve a problem than write a memo about it; you sit with the HeyCharge-Operated team, not just in their Friday standup.
• Strategic yet hands-on — equally comfortable defending a 3-year platform roadmap to the engineering team and reviewing a specific OCPP message handler with a backend engineer.
• Customer-obsessed — internal customer first, external second; you measure platform quality by what the people using it daily actually feel.

Who this role is not for

• If you’ve only owned consumer-facing products and the idea of designing for developers, OEM partners, and an internal ops team feels like a step down — this isn’t the role. Platform PM is its own discipline.
• If your reflex when HeyCharge-Operated raises an issue is to route it to engineering as a ticket rather than sitting with them to understand the underlying workflow — you’ll be miserable. The point of this role is to be in the room.
• If you need a fully defined platform abstraction before you can ship product against it, this is the wrong stage. You’ll be defining the abstraction as you go, and revising it when the second customer teaches you what was wrong with the first.
• If you need a team of product managers, designers, or analysts around you before you can produce results, this isn’t the right stage. You ARE the platform PM team for the first 12–18 months — writing the specs yourself, sitting with ops yourself, reviewing the API surface yourself. The team comes after the function is proven.
• If your default response to ambiguity at the boundary between “platform feature” and “ops service” is to escalate and wait — this is the wrong environment. The judgment of which one it is THIS quarter is the job.

Closing

If you want to own the platform that powers EV charging in places nobody else can reach — and you want to do it with an internal ops team as your first customer and a pipeline of OEMs and CPOs as your second — we’d love to hear from you. The platform is the product, and we’re hiring the person who’ll shape what it becomes.