Engineering Manager Embedded

Job description

Our mission at **Qwello** is to revolutionize the charging industry, we are committed to turn the world from combustion to electric. We put the customer first. We know their needs and deliver results they love. We design, build and operate charging infrastructure for the public space. We excel in simplicity, user focus and engineering excellence. We value diversity of thought, background and approaches and foster a culture of belonging. We understand that the best products are built by excellent teams, not individual superstars. **Be part of shaping the E-mobility of the future!** We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Embedded team - the team that designs, builds and ships Qwello's AC charging stations, from circuit board to firmware to the production line. This is not a pure software management role. Your team of 6-8 spans embedded software, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering, and your scope runs from the firmware release train for thousands of chargers in the field, through EMC labs and Eichrecht certification audits, to the contract manufacturer's factory floor. Our firmware is built on embedded Linux (Yocto) and EVerest, the open source EV charging stack we actively contribute to upstream. We are working with Rust, Python, C & C++. You will not be the deepest specialist in any one of these - your tech leads are - but you must be technical enough to represent the team when they are not in the room, to challenge estimates, and to make trade-offs between firmware, hardware and regulatory constraints with confidence and competence. If you have led embedded or hardware-adjacent teams, enjoy being the person to which a factory, a certification body and a firmware engineer all escalate in the same week, and who brings the self-organization to keep all of it moving without dropping balls, we would love to talk. **Please Note:** Tell us about a physical product you helped ship - what your team built, what went wrong on the way to production, and what your part in fixing it was. ### Your Responsibilities 🚀 - Lead and grow a team of 6-8 engineers across embedded software, electrical and mechanical engineering: 1:1s, performance reviews, compensation input, hiring and, when needed, structured performance management - Own delivery: quarterly planning and OKRs with leadership, translating requests from our country organizations into scoped, estimated engineering work, and saying no with a rationale when needed - Own the firmware release train (dev, canary, production) for the charger fleet and be answerable for fleet-impacting incidents alongside our operations teams - Drive certification and compliance as a permanent workstream: Eichrecht (Modul B and Modul D), CE and EMC campaigns, VDE and TÜV interactions, DSO assessments and upcoming regulation and technologies like vehicle-to-grid (V2G), changes to the AFIR and such - Manage key vendors and partners across the full bill of materials: our EVCC board supplier, meter vendors, payment terminal providers, the contract manufacturer running our production line, and our open source partners upstream - Keep production shippable: end-of-line testing, BOM changes and cost analysis, supply chain risk, and same-day escalation support when the factory line stops - Build a resilient team structure: develop tech leads, keep yourself off the critical path of IC work, and reduce bus factor on certification and hardware knowledge ### Your Profile ✨ - Several years of experience managing embedded, firmware or hardware-adjacent engineering teams, including hiring, performance reviews and difficult personnel conversations - A solid engineering background in embedded systems: you have shipped firmware or devices to production and can hold a technical argument with strong, opinionated senior engineers - Comfort with the physical side of the product: electronics, EMC, test labs, manufacturing. You do not need to design circuits, but this world must not be foreign to you - Demonstrated experience working with certification bodies, notified bodies or regulated products - or the appetite and rigor to own this quickly - Outstanding self-organization: this role has many parallel threads (people, releases, audits, vendors, factory), and following through reliably is the single most important skill - A track record of building self-managing teams: delegating, developing tech leads and staying off the critical path rather than being the hero - Excellent communication skills in English, from firmware engineers to executives to external auditors **Nice to have** - German language skills - a significant part of our supplier, certification and authority communication runs in German - Experience in EV charging or e-mobility: OCPP, ISO 15118, Eichrecht, smart charging - Familiarity with embedded Linux (Yocto), EVerest or other open source involvement, Rust or modern C++ - Experience working with contract manufacturers and owning production or end-of-line testing - Experience managing multi-generation products (legacy fleet plus new platform in parallel) ### Your Benefits 🪴 - Flat hierarchies with efficient decision-making processes without red tape - The opportunity to play a key role in shaping the mobility revolution - Work on products that have a direct impact on the future of sustainable transportation - Be part of an international and dynamic team of more than 30 nationalities - Enjoy a flexible hybrid setup — choose how you want to split your time between our Munich office and working from home, with the possibility of workation within the EU, plus 30 vacation days - Regular company and team events outside of the office to disconnect from our computers and reconnect with colleagues on hikes, mountain e-bike tours, offsites and more - Personal and professional development through in-house Lunch & Learn sessions, collaborative knowledge sharing, as well as externally provided training, courses and conferences - Discounted access to Wellpass for comprehensive wellbeing support - enjoy fitness, wellness, and mindfulness options to help you stay balanced and energized