Software Product Owner

We are looking for an experienced Software Product Owner who can bring structure, clarity, and confidence to our software releases.

Optics11 develops high-precision optical sensing solutions used in demanding, real-world environments. Our products combine advanced hardware, embedded systems, and software to deliver reliable measurement capabilities to customers worldwide. As our software portfolio expands beyond embedded firmware into broader software applications, we are strengthening release leadership to ensure reliable, well-integrated, and field-ready software deliveries.

As Software Product Owner, you are responsible for ensuring that software requirements are clear and that software can be released safely and reliably, with full visibility into readiness and risks. Building on a solid software engineering background, you will operate at the intersection of software engineering, hardware teams, embedded systems, and external development partners. Rather than defining product strategy or designing software architecture, you focus on ensuring requirements are clear, releases are well integrated, properly validated, and ready for real-world use. This is a high-impact coordination and leadership role with real influence on release timing and overall quality.

What you will do:

• Own the end-to-end software delivery lifecycle, from requirements clarification and release scope definition through validation and final deployment readiness.

• Drive alignment on release scope, priorities, and sequencing across software engineering, embedded, hardware, and external development teams to ensure business-critical functionality is delivered on time and with the expected quality.

• Act as the central point of ownership for release content, ensuring clear requirements and transparent decisions on what is included, deferred, or requires further validation based on technical risk, customer impact, and delivery timelines.

• Lead cross-functional integration planning and validation activities to ensure application software, embedded software, firmware, and hardware components work reliably as one customer-ready solution.

• Provide clear visibility into release readiness, risks, dependencies, and mitigation plans to stakeholders across the organization.

What you will not do:

• You will not define product strategy or customer priorities; these are owned by the Product Manager.

• You will not design software architecture or make technical implementation decisions.

Why Join Us?

• Join one of Europe’s most promising deep-tech scale-ups.

• Shape the future of a rapidly growing multidisciplinary R&D organization.

• Competitive salary and benefits package.

• Enjoy regular team activities and company events.

• Fresh team lunches provided3 times/ week.

What We’re Looking For:

• A technical background in Software Engineering or a related discipline, with sufficient technical depth to understand software development challenges.

• Strong experience in software-intensive product environments, ideally where software integrates with hardware or embedded systems.

• Proven experience coordinating complex releases across multiple product teams and stakeholders.

• Experience working with external software development partners and aligning on interfaces, quality standards, and delivery timelines.

• Solid understanding of software integration, validation, testing, and release processes in real-world product environments.

• Technically credible and confident in engaging with software and system engineers; able to challenge assumptions and assess readiness constructively.

• Structured, pragmatic and calm in complex situations, with the ability to create clarity and transparency around risks and trade-offs.

• Strong communicator who can align diverse stakeholders and make trade-offs visible.

This role requires a technical foundation and is therefore not suited for candidates whose experience is purely limited to Scrum Master or Agile Coach responsibilities.

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.

More information

If this sounds like the right challenge for you, we would love to get to know you. Apply or, in case of questions, get in touch with our recruiter Dóra Öveges (dora.oveges@optics11.com).