Senior Product Manager - Platform

FlowFuse is the enterprise platform that bridges physical assets and enterprise IT. Built on Node-RED, it lets industrial teams unify real-time data through workflows, AI agents, and industrial applications, extending rigid vendor systems with a low-code agility layer that adapts without rip-and-replace. Our customers run factories, energy grids, and supply chains on what we ship. When we get the platform wrong, a production line feels it.

We need someone to own the FlowFuse platform outright: the solution-agnostic foundation every customer solution is built on. That means enterprise management, edge and cloud deployment, industrial connectivity, industrial data modeling and contextualization, security, operator experience, and the reusable AI/ML capabilities that will set us apart. You decide where the platform goes over the next few years, and you write the work that gets it there.

This is not a roadmap-from-30,000-feet job. You will learn our customers and the industrial IoT (IIoT) space cold, then turn that knowledge into shipped platform capabilities that customers and our Solutions Engineering team reuse instead of rebuilding. You own the platform end to end: vision, roadmap, backlog, prioritization, refinement, and the GitHub issues your engineers actually build from. The tickets have to be exacting and technical. The work is hands-on and often unglamorous. You do it yourself before you ever hand it off.

If that sounds like the part of Product you'd rather skip, this isn't the role. If it sounds like the part you've been missing, keep reading.

What you'll actually do

• Own the platform roadmap. Hold the multi-year, solution-agnostic view, then break it into work that ships this sprint. Decide where to invest beyond today's customer requests, and what to build, integrate, or source through partners. Track where industrial software and our competitors are heading, and decide where FlowFuse can establish meaningful differentiation.
• Run the field-to-platform loop. Partner with Solutions Engineering to spot product gaps and recurring patterns in customer deployments. Decide what becomes a platform capability, what stays in the solution library, and what remains customer-specific. The goal: field-developed work becomes repeatable enterprise solutions, not unicorns we rebuild for every customer.
• Learn our customers and the IIoT domain fast, then keep learning. Run continuous discovery. Sit in on sales and customer calls, mine the recordings in Fathom for the problem behind the request, and talk to users directly.
• Make industrial data a first-class part of the platform. Lead the direction for industrial data modeling and contextualization: data models defined once and enforced across instances and sites, and the relationships between machines, processes, production events, decisions, and outcomes that our workflows and AI build on. AI readiness starts here.
• Shape AI/ML in the platform. Lead the product direction for reusable AI/ML capabilities (AI-assisted development, agentic workflows, industrial data reasoning, machine vision integration), with clear judgment about what's production-ready versus a promising demo.
• Make the platform enterprise-ready. Make it easier for customers and solution engineers to build, deploy, govern, and operate distributed Node-RED applications across many sites, mixed equipment, and cloud or self-hosted environments.
• Run the lane day to day. Triage the backlog and every new idea that flies in, prioritize ruthlessly, sequence it, and get it into sprints.
• Write GitHub issues your engineers respect. Precise, technical, unambiguous, with testable acceptance criteria. They should never have to guess what "done" means.
• Run refinement with engineering. Show up prepared, make the calls, unblock fast, and validate outcomes after release.
• Know the split. Product owns the roadmap, the what, and the why, and writes the issues. Engineering owns the how, technical design, and delivery estimates. Scope and sequencing tradeoffs are made together. There's no classic PM / designer / engineer trio here. It's mostly you and the engineers.
• Wear other hats. This is a small startup. Some weeks the highest-leverage thing you can do isn't in your job description. You do it anyway.

The harder part of the job

Leadership here moves fast and thinks out loud. Ideas arrive at high volume and high velocity, from the CEO, our investors, your peers, and the live customer deals sales is racing to close. Part of the job is to be the filter and the translation layer. Absorb that energy, turn it into a clear and sequenced plan, and protect the engineering team's focus so they can do their best work. You don't pass chaos through. You stop it at your desk.

You'll partner closely with Solutions Engineering, who own customer solutions, industry-specific applications, and solution packaging. They are your most important internal customer. A big part of being effective is turning their field requests into platform capabilities that serve many solutions, not one, without the team feeling whiplash.

You'll also work with our CTO on technical direction and the Node-RED ecosystem. The CTO leads the Node-RED open-source project. You can advocate for upstream changes, but you don't own that project.

You report to the VP of Engineering and Product. You work with the engineering team, not against it. Earning their trust is the job, not a nice-to-have.

Where this goes

You start as a product team of one, owning the platform and doing the groundwork yourself. You may stay a team of one for a while, and we'd rather say that up front. From day one, you bring a point of view on where the platform should go. We're hiring someone to shape the plan, not just execute the one they inherit. Prove you can run it, and the path opens: take on more of the product surface, build and lead a product team, and help shape the wider product vision for FlowFuse. This scope is additive, not a graduation. A bigger title doesn't mean your baseline changes, at least not until you've built a team. We're putting that in writing because we mean it.

Your first 90 days

• Day 30. You know the platform, its backlog, and our biggest customer commitments. You're fluent in the tools we run on (GitHub, Slack, Asana, Claude, Google Workspace) and working in them daily. You've sat in on refinements and written tickets to the standard we expect. You've met Solutions Engineering, sales, and marketing, and you know who owns what.
• Day 60. You own the platform backlog and a published, prioritized roadmap. Your engineers trust your tickets enough to stop asking what you meant. You've stood up the field-to-platform intake process with Solutions Engineering and made real calls on what becomes platform and what doesn't.
• Day 90. You've shipped a multi-week platform effort that solved a real customer problem and is reused beyond one deployment. You've set baselines for reuse, time-to-value, adoption, and reliability, and picked the first one or two AI/ML opportunities with a validation plan. You're the person everyone goes to for the state of the platform.

Your first year

• Platform capabilities shipped and reused across multiple customer deployments, not rebuilt in the field.
• Field-developed solutions turned into repeatable enterprise offerings.
• Measurable reductions in onboarding effort, deployment effort, and solution delivery time against your 90-day baselines.
• A credible long-term platform strategy alongside an always execution-ready near-term roadmap.

What we're looking for

• A bias toward action. You move fast, ship, and show your work. You'd rather make a reversible call today than schedule a meeting about it next week.
• Evidence you can do the craft. You've owned a backlog, written engineering-ready specs and tickets, and shipped capabilities that got adopted. We'll ask to see it (more below).
• Strategic product vision and competitive foresight. You can look three to five years out and explain where industrial software, data, and AI are heading, what competitors are building, and what that means for what we build, partner for, or avoid. Show us a time your read of the market changed a roadmap.
• Industrial depth, or proof you learn hard domains fast. Experience in manufacturing, industrial automation, or IIoT, and an understanding of how OT, plant-floor systems, and enterprise IT intersect, is a strong plus. So is a track record of going deep on something hard, with receipts. We've hired the experienced-on-paper version before. It didn't ship.
• Platform experience. You've shipped B2B platforms, infrastructure, developer tools, or similarly technical products, and you've found reusable capabilities inside customer-specific work.
• Fluency with engineers. You speak their language, respect their constraints, and make their lives easier, not harder.
• AI/ML product judgment. Experience taking AI/ML or LLM-powered capabilities from concept to adoption, ideally at the edge or in industrial settings, is a strong plus. At minimum, you can tell a production-ready capability from a promising demo.
• Fluent with AI tools. You already use them to draft specs, prototype, and move faster, and you're hungry for better ways to work. We run on this stuff. You should too.
• Spine. You coach people toward their best work, hold a firm line on guardrails, and when someone won't improve, you make the hard call. Tough and fair. People who listen do their best work with you.
• A taste for startups specifically. If you thrive on predictability, you'll be miserable here. If ambiguity energizes you, you'll thrive. Don't worry, we at least have processes we all agreed to.
• People management experience is welcome but not required to start. Tell us honestly what you've done and what you want next. We’re growing and we want you to, too.
• Familiarity with Node-RED or open-source ecosystems is a plus.
• We're hiring for the right person, not a fixed title. A strong mid-level PM ready to own an area, a senior PM who wants back into the hands-on craft — even someone whose sights are set on Director. Whoever you are, you start in the same seat: owning an area and doing the work yourself. Experienced or not, that's the baseline, and it's non-negotiable. Earn it here and the scope opens fast (see "Where this goes"). Tell us where you are and we'll meet you there.

Logistics

• Remote-only and async-first. We default to writing things down. Engineering sits mostly in Europe; customer-facing teams are in the US and Europe. This role is open to candidates in the United States or Europe.Working hours are flexible, but we appreciate overlap with West Coast US. We'll hire almost anywhere we can legally (a few countries excepted).
• Compensation. Competitive base, calibrated to your level, plus meaningful equity.
• Unlimited paid time off. We mean it, and the team actually takes it.
• What you'll live in. FlowFuse, Node-RED, GitHub Issues and Projects, Hubspot, PostHog, Slack, Asana, and Google Meet.