Hardware Development Project Manager

About the Role

We are a growing consumer electronics SME delivering wearables, smart home devices, and networking products. We are looking for a hands-on and resourceful Hardware Development Project Manager to guide products from concept to mass production in a lean environment, without relying on a large PMOstructure. The right person will be comfortable with schedules, cost models, technical details, supplier discussions, and senior stakeholder updates. They should be a strong active listener who can take complex technical input and turn it into clear actions, decisions, and practical business updates. This role suits someone with calm confidence: able to make decisions, challenge assumptions, and hold people accountable, while remaining self-aware, collaborative, and respectful of technical expertise.

Key Responsibilities
& Deliverables

Project ownership and delivery: . Own end-to-end hardware development schedules across multiple product lines, from concept through EVT,DVT, PVT, and MP. . Drive stage-gate discipline with clear actions, owners, due dates, decision logs, and current master trackers accessible to the full team. . Make timely, data-grounded decisions based on available information, while being willing to revisit decisions when new information justifies a change. . Coordinate mechanical, PCB, firmware, mobile app, supply chain, manufacturing, and quality workstreams across geographies and time zones. Communication and meeting rhythm: . Design and manage a practical communication cadence covering weekly cross-functional meetings, milestone reviews, supplier calls, leadership updates, and structured asynchronous follow-ups. . Run purposeful meetings with clear agendas, preparation expectations, time control, focused discussion, explicit decisions, owners, deadlines, and concise notes issued within 24hours. . Know when not to meet: resolve straightforward issues asynchronously, reduce unnecessary recurring meetings, and protect the team's focus time. . Translate technical complexity into plain language for non-technical founders and senior stakeholders, including concise PowerPoint updates showing key risks, decisions, and recommendations. Listening, alignment, and stakeholder management: . Actively listen in cross-functional discussions, identify misalignment early, ensure the right voices are heard, and distil engineering, supply chain, factory, and leadership inputs into clear next steps. . Represent the project with quiet confidence to founders, senior leadership, suppliers, ODM/OEM partners, contract manufacturers, certification labs, and other external stakeholders. . Follow up with suppliers and partners firmly and professionally when commitments, deadlines, or deliverables are missed, while preserving working relationships. Documentation, cost, quality, and risk control: . Own the SharePoint project environment, including schedules, BOMs, ECO logs, risk registers, certification trackers, decision records, naming conventions, and version control. . Build and maintain cost models covering BOM, tooling, NRE, landed cost per unit, tooling amortisation, assembly, freight, duties, and warranty reserves. . Track and report metrics such as schedule variance, defect rates, yield rates, ECO frequency, DPPM, first-pass yield, AQL sampling, cost-to-complete, and quantified cost/schedule impacts. . Manage regulatory certification timelines proactively, including FCC, CE, RoHS, SRRC, MIC, and related RF certification schedule risks. . Lead factory readiness reviews, oversee initial production ramp, own yield and quality data during PVT an dearly MP, and maintain a living risk register with impact and probability scoring. Required Skills & Capabilities

Technical: . Solid understanding of hardware development for wireless connected devices, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Zigbee,LTE/5G, and systems-level connectivity stacks such as Wi-Fi 6/6E/7, BluetoothLE, Thread, and Matter. . Familiarity with wearable-specific constraints, including miniaturisation, battery life, FSR/touch input, biometric sensors, IP ratings, and product reliability expectations. . Working knowledge of RF certification processes, including FCC, CE, SRRC, and related schedule impacts. . Comfortable reviewing PCB layouts, mechanical drawings, and BOMs, and able to ask the right technical and commercial questions. . Experience managing firmware and mobile app integration dependencies, with an understanding of DFM/DFA and SMT manufacturing principles. Project management: . Able to manage lean, efficient project tracking without depending on enterprise PMO tools. . Comfortable managing multiple concurrent product lines with limited resources. . Strong cost awareness in an SME environment, including NRE, tooling, unit economics, budget risks, ECO discipline, and change management. Numeracy and data: . Strong numerical literacy across cost models, yield data, production metrics, financial summaries, supplier scorec