Hardware Product Lead - AI Builder - Home Energy Products

Emporia Energy•Littleton, CO

47d•$130,000 - $170,000•Onsite

About The Position

Emporia is a leading technology company revolutionizing home energy by providing affordable, integrated solutions that empower homeowners to optimize energy usage to reduce costs and carbon footprint. Emporia’s Home Energy Management Platform is a powerful software system that connects their Vue Home Energy Monitor, Level 2 EV Charger, Smart Plugs, Home Battery, and third-party thermostats and appliances. By automating energy use through real-time monitoring and scheduling, the platform optimizes consumption, reduces costs, and simplifies home energy management—all within one intuitive app. With over 400,000 U.S. homes running Emporia’s energy management and EV charging hardware, we are now launching a national Third-Party Owned (TPO) home battery Virtual Power Plant — placing industrial-rated home batteries in residential homes to deliver power redundancy, utility cost savings, and grid peak demand services. By reducing energy waste and saving customers money, we’re helping create a healthier planet and a brighter future. For more information, visit emporiaenergy.com. Emporia was founded in 2018 with a clear purpose to revolutionize home energy, generate tangible customer savings, and accelerate the transition to a lower carbon future. We are striving to become the world's leading home energy management platform and build the largest virtual power plant. Customers First : We deliver exceptional service with empathy and responsiveness, building lasting trust in every interaction. Own the Outcome : We think like owners, taking responsibility for results and holding ourselves and each other accountable. Win Together : We succeed together through honesty, humility and humanity. Grit Gets it Done : We work hard, stay passionate, and persevere through challenges. Better Every Day : We challenge the status quo, take smart risks and aim to improve 1% every day. Emporia's home energy products are already in hundreds of thousands of homes: our Level 2 EV chargers, the Vue Energy Monitor, and the Smart Plug. They earn revenue today, they sit in competitive categories, and they carry the install base everything else builds on. This role owns all three. This is not a new-product job. The work is keeping a mature portfolio healthy, competitive, and profitable: field quality, cost, supply continuity, incremental revisions, and the eventual end-of-life call. The Product Lead is the DRI, the single-person decision maker for product definition, development, and launch. They do not necessarily do all the work, but they ensure the work gets done. Where this description says "own," it means accountable for the decision and the outcome, not doing the work alone. On this portfolio that means every change that ships, from a firmware release to a board revision to a price move. Operations and Sustaining run field service, RMA processing, and production; you own the product decisions behind them. You report to SVP Product. Revisions and new SKUs still move through the same product development lifecycle (PDLC) as any new product, just in shorter cycles. We move quickly by being disciplined, not by skipping process. The same stage-gates and deliverables stay in place: PRD, PCD, business case, design reviews, launch readiness. AI should accelerate the work to be done and minimize and remove hand offs along the way.

Requirements

5+ years in product management for hardware, including real ownership of shipping products and not only new product introduction.
A track record as a DRI, accountable for outcomes and not just definition, comfortable with ambiguity and parallel workstreams.
Experience owning sustaining work: field quality, warranty and RMA analysis, firmware release decisions, and root cause with engineering.
A track record of cost-down and margin improvement on products already in production.
Experience with component obsolescence, second sourcing, and supply continuity.
Comfort with competitive and pricing decisions in a crowded consumer category.
Heavy, fluent use of AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Grok or similar), plus a habit of building your own tooling instead of asking for headcount, and getting others to adopt it.
Business sense: ability to own a business case, unit economics, and margin trade-offs.
Strong cross-functional leadership: leading through influence and escalating well without formal reporting authority.
Experience running a formal gate process for hardware, and a belief that discipline is what makes speed possible.

Nice To Haves

EV charging, energy monitoring, smart plugs, or other connected home hardware.
Consumer electronics sold at retail and direct-to-consumer scale.
Recertification experience (UL, FCC, Energy Star) after design or component changes.
High-volume manufacturing quality work: DPPM, FAI, yield, and RMA analysis.
Fleet telemetry and cohort analysis on a large install base.
A career spanning both product management and program management, in a fast-paced, test and validation driven environment.

Responsibilities

Owning the roadmap across all three lines (EVSE, Vue, and Smart Plug) and the prioritization between them.
Owning competitive positioning and pricing in crowded categories, tracking competitor shipments and their roadmap implications.
Building the business case for every proposed change, including cost, margin, volume, and payback, utilizing AI as needed.
Translating support tickets, telemetry, reviews, and RMA data into a ranked list of fixes and new features, using AI for analysis.
Owning the sustaining roadmap, including firmware releases, field-quality issues, and warranty/reliability trends.
Driving root cause analysis for field failures with Engineering, Quality, and Customer Support, and deciding on fixes in firmware, hardware, or documentation.
Partnering with Customer Support to engineer out top contact and return drivers.
Using AI to close knowledge gaps in failure data, logs, and schematics.
Driving cost-down initiatives through component substitutions, design-for-cost changes, and supplier negotiation.
Managing component obsolescence and single-source risk by qualifying replacements and second sources.
Ensuring compliance continuity with Engineering and Compliance, including recertification when components or designs change.
Collaborating with Operations on volume planning, yield, and quality to meet demand.
Defining and driving hardware revisions, new variants, and SKU additions through the product development lifecycle.
Negotiating scope and timeline with Engineering and Operations for changes.
Making the final decision on when and how each change ships.
Owning launch and go-to-market for revisions and new SKUs with Marketing, BD, and Customer Support.
Owning end-of-availability and end-of-life decisions with a transition plan for customers and channel.
Driving AI adoption across all phases of the job, automating and optimizing manual, slow, or expensive steps in the PDLC.
Challenging the default approach and encouraging the broader team to adopt AI-enabled execution.
Building and sharing personal tools, prompts, and workflows.
Providing honest feedback on AI effectiveness and contributing to Emporia's AI adoption strategy.