Product Tech Lead (all genders)

At OpenProject, we build open source project management software that helps teams plan, collaborate, and deliver work more effectively. We believe great software should empower people to organize work in a way that supports autonomy, accountability, and collaboration across boundaries.

As Product Tech Lead, you’ll play a key role in turning that vision into reality. You’ll bridge software engineering, product management, and leadership by guiding your team of software engineers to create a product that is both technically sound and deeply aligned with user needs. Your goal is to bring clarity while focusing on what truly matters, especially when the path forward isn’t fully defined, yet.

Your Mission

• Own new product initiatives end-to-end from problem definition to launch. That includes user research, concept development, validation, implementation, roll-out, and continuous improvement.

• Shape the roadmap, evaluate and prioritize ideas based on company strategy, and regularly present and discuss your team’s roadmap with the product management team.

• Bridge disciplines: think like a product manager, act like an engineer. You translate between users, clients, and your team to ensure real needs are met.

• Build quick prototypes yourself and work closely with engineers and stakeholders inside and outside your team.

• Communicate clearly and proactively, especially in a remote-first environment, tailoring your communication to different audiences.

• Collaborate across functions: align with Sales, Marketing, UX/UI, QA, and leadership to ensure shared understanding and coordinated delivery.

• Contribute your own approaches and lessons learned from past product development experiences.

What you’ll bring

• Proven experience building and launching digital products end-to-end with lessons learned from real product successes and failures.

• A strong product mindset — you care deeply about why and for whom you build, not just what you build.

• Senior-level experience in software engineering, ideally with Ruby on Rails. You’ve built and maintained complex web applications across the full stack.

• Experience applying product management metholodogies and practices such as agile, user research, design thinking, or rapid prototyping.

• The ability to quickly prototype ideas and collaborate with developers on equal footing.

• Strong written communication skills help you make complex ideas easy to grasp and fluency in English as our business language is a must-have. Ideally, you’re also fluent in German.

• Leadership that fosters psychological safety, constructive challenge, and DEIB principles.

• Curiosity, openness to experimentation, and a willingness to engage in thoughtful, sometimes passionate, discussions with peers.

What awaits you

• The best of both worlds: the creative challenges and learning opportunities of a start-up combined with the financial stability of a “grown-up” company in a team of dedicated professionals.

• The flexibility to decide from where you would like to work: remotely in a location within 2 hours (time-zone) from Berlin, Germany.

• Contributing to an open source project with high visibility and transparency within the developer world (our software code is freely available on Github).

• You will work with a team of experienced software engineers in continuous delivery and integration processes who love to learn from each other.

• Once a year, we dedicate our "Passion Time" off-site to work on any improvements of our choice with a business impact (e.g. product improvements, marketing concepts,...) in multi-disciplinary teams.

• Employee benefits such as job bikes and paid child care.

• You will be in touch with exciting clients and users from all around the globe, including NGOs and other open source projects which we love to support in fulfilling their mission (such as Greenpeace, Engineers without Frontiers), corporates like Siemens, Deutsche Bahn or Audi and public institutions like German Federal Ministries.

Find out more on

...our company and product: openproject.org
...our code: github.com/opf/openproject
...our employee and candidate satisfaction: https://www.kununu.com/de/openproject or https://tinyurl.com/glassdooropenproject

Still have some questions before applying? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us (talents@openproject.com).