Senior Product Engineer

As Senior Product Engineer, you will join the team full-time in a senior, hands-on product role. You will own three to five enterprise customers end to end: discovery, technical scoping, gating UAT, and rollout. You report to Co-founder Simon and work day-to-day with our engineering and product teams.

You won't be writing production code in this role; engineering owns the codebase. What you will do is co-design the production build with engineering and run first-line UAT before anything reaches a customer.

Concretely, this includes:

• Owning the technical relationship with three to five enterprise customers (running the workshops, scoping the work, driving a monthly or quarterly release cadence with engineering)
• Validating ideas before engineering invests, through design briefs, scoping docs or quick prototypes when useful, and co-designing the production build with engineering
• Running first-line UAT: defining acceptance criteria, reviewing what engineering ships against them, catching issues before customers see them
• Translating customer reality into clear engineering briefs and engineering reality into clear customer expectations. Pushing back on scope when a request won't move the metric that matters
• Iteratively integrating Vanilla Steel's AI pipeline into customer workflows and systems (ERP and others)
• Sequencing delivery against engineering capacity, deciding what goes into the next sprint for your customers in collaboration with our Head of Tech
• Representing the product credibly in front of senior procurement, sales and IT stakeholders at industrial customers, and in front of investors when the customer happens to also sit on our cap table

This is a senior, technical product role. We are open to two profiles: a senior product manager with strong technical depth, or a Principal Engineer / Senior IC moving into a Product Lead role, even without a formal product title, provided they bring the stakeholder management and customer instincts the role needs.

• 5+ years in product, with at least 2 years in genuinely technical roles (engineering, technical PM at a real engineering company, solutions architect, forward-deployed engineer)
• Recent production code: you have shipped production code in the last 2 years (verifiable on GitHub). You won't be writing production code here, but the technical bar is high. Be ready to walk us through what you wrote and why
• Strong technical co-design instincts: you can read code, evaluate an architecture, and push back in a design review with engineering, even though you don't own the production codebase
• First-line UAT discipline: you've personally signed off (or rejected) enterprise releases and can describe the framework you used
• AI-native daily user: you build with LLMs, agents and modern AI tooling as part of your normal workflow and understand how model behaviour shapes product experience
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English and in German (C1 or C2, must have, native not required). You can run a technical workshop with a German industrial customer end to end
• Comfortable owning multiple enterprise customers in parallel without dropping balls, and pushing back on scope when needed
• Ability to simplify complexity and make fast, sound decisions under pressure
• EU work permission, Berlin-based or willing to relocate
• Industrial B2B, metals, supply chain or manufacturing experience is a strong plus
• Nice-to-have: comfort with AI prototyping tools (Cursor, Claude Code or comparable), useful but not required
• Nice-to-have: background in an AI-first company or a team building with LLMs in production
• Nice-to-have: exposure to ERP integrations (SAP, Odoo, Microsoft Dynamics) or to procurement / order management workflows
• Nice-to-have: early-stage or founding-engineer experience

• Ownership of named enterprise accounts with a focus on outcomes rather than time-tracking
• Direct technical impact: you will see what you ship in production within weeks, not quarters
• Senior co-founders who are technical operators, not pitch-deck founders. Decisions happen fast
• Competitive base, performance bonus, and a clear path to meaningful equity at a Series A company
• Regular travel to customer sites (mainly Central Germany)
• Subsidized Urban Sports Club membership
• Subsidized Deutschlandticket
• Hybrid work format
• Beautiful office located in the heart of Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin
• Regular team building events, company breakfasts and Friday drinks