Engineering Manager Product Team

At Optics11, we are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead a multidisciplinary Product Team working at the intersection of hardware and software.

At Optics11, we are building one of Europe’s most exciting deep-tech scale-up environments, developing advanced fiber optic sensing technology that protects critical infrastructure across underwater security, energy, and industrial applications.

In this role, you will lead a group of engineers responsible for delivering complete product solutions that combine hardware and software capabilities. Your focus will be on building strong teams, enabling effective execution, and ensuring predictable delivery of product features and releases. Rather than defining technical solutions yourself, your role is to create the environment, structure, and team dynamics in which engineers can perform at their best and successfully deliver high-quality products.

This position sits at the intersection of people leadership, product delivery, and cross-functional collaboration, ensuring that product development remains aligned, efficient, and scalable.

• Coach, mentor, and grow engineers across multiple disciplines

• Drive performance management, feedback, and career development

• Build a collaborative, accountable, and high-performing team culture

• Hire and onboard new engineers to strengthen team capability

• Ensure the team delivers product features and releases in a predictable and sustainable way

• Align team capacity with product priorities and roadmap

• Balance delivery speed, quality, and long-term sustainability

• Provide clear visibility on progress, risks, and dependencies

• Work closely with Product Owners to support delivery of defined scope

• Collaborate with System Engineering to ensure alignment with system architecture

• Coordinate across disciplines to ensure smooth integration

• Support readiness for product releases

• Continuously improve development processes, workflows, and collaboration

• Remove blockers and increase team effectiveness

• Optimize planning, coordination, and execution

• Drive improvements in tooling and engineering efficiency

• Work closely with platform teams to ensure availability of required capabilities

• Align product development with platform evolution

• Facilitate communication across teams and disciplines

• Support effective cross-team coordination and dependency management

• Create the conditions for delivering reliable, well-integrated, and maintainable product solutions

• Support strong engineering practices, testing, and validation

• Ensure product readiness for integration and release

• Experience leading and developing engineering teams of 10–15+ engineers

• Strong people leadership and coaching skills

• Experience working in product development environments

• Strong understanding of engineering development processes and product development cycles

• Strong communication skills and ability to work across multiple teams

• Strong understanding of cross-functional collaboration and system integration

• Ability to improve team performance, processes, and delivery

• MSc in Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, Systems Engineering, or a related technical field

• clear ownership and strong collaboration

• empowered teams and technical leadership

• continuous improvement and learning

• building scalable and reusable solutions

You'll be working with clients in the defense and security sectors, obtaining a Certificate of No Objection issued by the AIVD (Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service) is mandatory. This means you will need to undergo a security screening. For more information, please refer to details on security screening. 

So now you know we're doing awesome projects and if you see you fit the profile we would like to get to know you. Apply or, in case of questions, get in touch with our recruiter Dóra Öveges ( dora.oveges@optics11.com).