Product Manager, Control & Safety Hardware

The Product Manager (PM) for the Control & Safety Hardware is a high-impact leadership role responsible for the FORT platform's intelligent control layer and safety-critical core. This role acts as the primary architect of the product vision, bridging the gap between engineering requirements and market-moving solutions.

The PM will move "upstream" in the product lifecycle to engage with customers earlier, eliciting requirements that shape the future of autonomous machine control. By leveraging a deep background in functional safety and systems thinking, the PM ensures that FORT’s core platform is compliant, secure, and is the primary engine for the company’s growth into new industrial and government verticals.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership & Product Vision

• Roadmap Ownership: Define and execute the 12-month roadmap for the platform’s control & safety layers, prioritizing innovations that drive autonomy & machine intelligence.
• Customer Discovery: Lead the discovery phase by conducting various forms of research & engaging with stakeholders to identify needs, ensuring customer-centric requirements are established before technical development begins.
• Safety as a Competitive Advantage: Position FORT’s safety-critical architecture as a primary market differentiator, ensuring the product vision aligns with global standards and customer trust.
• New Vertical Expansion: Lead technical proposal efforts for high-stakes innovative projects. Identify and target new verticals that align with the platform vision, ensuring FORT remains the standard for safety governance across industries.

Technical Execution & System Governance

• Requirement Lifecycle Excellence: Orchestrate a tool-agnostic requirement architecture that drives simplicity and clarity for engineering teams while maintaining rigorous compliance with ISO 9001 and SIL standards.
• Regulatory & Security Navigation: Act as the strategic lead for global regulatory shifts (ex. EU Machinery Regulation, Cyber Resilience Act), ensuring the platform remains ahead of compliance curves.
• Standards Expertise: Maintain expert knowledge of and ensure product compliance with key functional safety standards, including ISO 13849 and IEC 61508.
• Security Integration: Proactively monitor the evolving security landscape, integrating security-by-design principles into all functional requirements.
• Interface Ownership: Own the requirement lifecycle for safety-critical hardware-software interfaces and controls integration.
• Cross-Functional Impact Analysis: Conduct high-level trade studies and impact analysis to ensure technical alignment across all platform layers, minimizing risk and maximizing system reliability for existing and new projects.
• Quality & Certification (QE): Partner with Quality Engineering and Safety teams to oversee certification efforts (e.g., SIL 3) and ensure the control layer meets the highest "Definition of Done" standards.

Stakeholder & Lifecycle Management

• Strategic Communication: Distill complex system architectures into clear, value-driven narratives for executive leadership and external partners.
• Operational Simplicity: Streamline the transition of features through the Product Development Life Cycle (PDLC), ensuring that compliance processes support rather than hinder development velocity.
• Feedback Integration: Monitor field data and support trends to identify systemic improvements, ensuring the long-term stability and scalability of the control ecosystem.
• Backlog Governance: Act as the Product Owner, managing the control backlog and ensuring all product decisions are grounded in validated metrics.
• Go-to-Market Support: Partner with Marketing and Sales to develop technical collateral, user guidance, and launch strategies for new cloud and data products.

Qualifications

• Experience: 4+ years of experience in Product Management or Systems Engineering within high-integrity environments (ex. aerospace, robotics, or medical).
• AI-First Mindset: The Product Manager must be well-versed in leveraging machine intelligence, predictive safety, and data-driven insights to integrate AI effectively into the core product strategy and expedite output.
• Safety & Systems Expertise: Deep understanding of functional safety principles and the ability to manage products at the intersection of complex logic and physical machine control.
• Methodology & Frameworks: Expert knowledge of the Product Development Life Cycle (PDLC) and experience operating within Agile/Scrum frameworks for complex systems.

• Technical Toolset

  • Proficient in Monday.com and Jira for roadmap and project management; experienced with advanced requirement management platforms and system modeling tools.
  • Experienced with embedded systems, Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS), and safety-critical hardware/software integration.

• Market Acumen: Proven ability to support business development for complex government and industrial contracts, with a focus on creating new market opportunities.

• Leadership: Strong collaborative skills with the ability to influence cross-functional teams without direct authority.

• Drive: Extremely driven to achieve aggressive goals, with demonstrable motivation aligned to the company's core mission.