Hardware Product Lead - AI Builder

Reports to: SVP, Product
Location: Onsite in Littleton, CO

About Emporia Energy

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. 

Mission, Vision and Values

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.

Role Overview

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.

Responsibilities

Portfolio & Roadmap: Owning What Ships

Own the roadmap across all three lines and the prioritization between them.

• Own the roadmap for EVSE, Vue, and Smart Plug, and make the call on where effort goes when all three want the same engineering week.
• Own competitive positioning and pricing in crowded categories, tracking what competitors ship and what it means for our roadmap.
• Build the business case for every change you propose, with AI as-needed: cost, margin, volume, and payback.
• Turn support tickets, telemetry, reviews, and RMA data into a ranked list of what to fix and what to build, using AI to read the volume rather than sampling it.

Field Quality & Sustaining: The Core of the Job

Shipping products fail in the field, and the product side owns the answer to why.

• Own the sustaining roadmap: firmware releases, field-quality issues, and warranty and reliability trends feeding back into requirements.
• Drive root cause on field failures with Engineering, Quality, and Customer Support, and decide what gets fixed in firmware, in hardware, or in documentation.
• Partner with Customer Support so the top drivers of contacts and returns get engineered out, not just answered faster.
• Use AI to close knowledge gaps in failure data, logs, and schematics, so your discussions with subject matter experts start further along.

Cost, Supply & Compliance

On mature products, margin and continuity are where the leverage is.

• Drive cost-down: component substitutions, design-for-cost changes, and supplier negotiation, protecting margin as categories get more competitive.
• Stay ahead of component obsolescence and single-source risk, qualifying replacements and second sources before they become urgent.
• Drive compliance continuity with Engineering and Compliance, including recertification when a component or design changes (UL, FCC, Energy Star, and others as they apply).
• Work with Operations on volume planning, yield, and quality so supply keeps up with demand.

Revisions, New SKUs & EOL

Incremental releases are still real product launches, just faster.

• Define and drive hardware revisions, new variants, and SKU additions through the same gates, at a cycle time that fits the size of the change.
• Write the requirements, negotiate scope and timeline with Engineering and Operations to a shared commitment, and make the final call on when and how each change ships.
• Own launch and go-to-market for revisions and new SKUs working with Marketing, BD, and Customer Support, including channel and support readiness.
• Own end-of-availability and end-of-life decisions, with a transition plan for customers and channel.

Driving AI Adoption: Across Every Phase

Native AI-use runs through the whole job. Gates, deliverables, and approvals stay in place. The waiting between them goes. Push that on the team, not just yourself.

• Automate and optimize the manual, slow, or expensive steps you find in the PDLC. Push yourself and the broader team to challenge the default approach without diluting the deliverable.
• Use AI to build at the edge of capability. Exemplify AI-enabled execution, encouraging Engineering, Operations, and partners to push past their traditional approach and deliver faster.
• Build and share your own tools, prompts, and workflows instead of asking for headcount.
• Be honest about where AI is not working, and feed real evidence back into how Emporia adopts it.

Required Qualifications & Skills

• 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: you can own a business case, unit economics, and margin trade-offs leadership will bet on.
• Strong cross-functional leadership: you lead through influence and escalate well without formal reporting authority.
• Experience running a formal gate process for hardware, and a belief that discipline is what makes speed possible.

Desired Qualifications & Skills

• 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.

What We Offer

💰 Compensation: The expected base salary range is $130,000 - $170,000, plus stock options. The offered salary will depend on numerous factors, including but not limited to work experience, skills, and internal equity considerations. The base salary does not include benefits or other incentives.

🏥 Benefits:

• 100% company-paid premiums for medical, dental and vision insurance for employees and dependents
• 401(k)
• Employee stock option program
• Paid holidays plus unlimited PTO
• Discounts on Emporia products and partner offerings

📈 Career Growth: Be part of a fast-growing company at the forefront of home energy innovation.

Emporia Energy is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, age, disability, gender identity, results of genetic testing, service in the military, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local laws. We will make reasonable accommodations for any qualified applicant with a disability, provided that the individual is otherwise qualified to safely perform the essential functions of the job with or without accommodation and that the accommodation would not impose an undue hardship on the operation of our business. Please let us know if you believe you require reasonable accommodation, or if you would like assistance to complete an application or to participate in an interview at the company.

New employees will be required to successfully complete a background check.

Any communication to applicants relating to the Emporia Energy hiring process will only come from email addresses with the domains emporiaenergy.com or [email protected]. If in the course of the application or hiring process with Emporia Energy you are contacted through another domain, are requested to provide banking or other sensitive information, or you note any other suspicious activity, please contact [email protected].