Product Development Lead (f/m/d)

About TACTILIA:

At TACTILIA, we are building the industry-ready robotic hand that closes one of the biggest gaps in Physical AI. Spun out of SCHUNK, the global market leader in gripping technology, we combine a decade of robotic-hand expertise and real industrial access with the speed and ambition of a deep-tech startup.

This isn't a research project waiting for its first customer. We already have a product, customers are ready to use it, and we are launching now. Your work will directly shape the product, roadmap, and development process that make that possible.

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?

The Role

As a Product Development Lead 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.

What you will do:

• 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.

What you bring:

• A degree in Mechatronics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a comparable technical field.
• 5+ years of experience developing mechatronic or hardware products, including experience in product development or technical project/program 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.

Bonus

• 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.

That means your decisions will have a lasting impact — not just on a product, but on what comes next for Physical AI.

Build the hand. Define the standard. Shape what comes next.

If you're excited by the challenge of building robotic hands that work reliably in the real world, we'd love to hear from you.