TLDR

🏎️ TLDR: Cognyx is an early stage VC-backed tech (SaaS) company building groundbreaking technology to accelerate engineering cycles. We’re hiring one of our very first employees, and a key member of our “Founding Team”. Working closely with our clients and Tech teams, our Founding Product Manager will be responsible for shaping the product vision and strategy (with a strong focus on AI), driving all aspects of Product-related operations. An exciting, central and entrepreneurial role in which versatile profiles will have a blast laying the foundations of groundbreaking tech! 

🕵️ Position also known as: “First PM”, Head of Product, Product Lead, Senior Product Manager, Early-stage CPO (Chief Product Officer)…

📌 Location(s): Paris (60%), client location (20%, likely in Paris), WFH (20%). Remote work is not offered for this position.

💶 Salary range: 65-100k€ + BSPCE (1st batch, 0.5-1%) + intéressement bonus (2-3 months salary upon reaching ARR milestones at company level). Usual French perks. Quick salary progression, tied with fundraising and/or growth milestones.

📑 Type of Contract: CDI (Contrat à Durée Indéterminée), usual SYNTEC branch perks.

👏 Direct reporting line: Co-Founder & CEO (Matthias Berahya-Lazarus).

Cognyx in a nutshell

Our ambition: empower thousands of industrial and manufacturing companies to design and engineer hardware products at software speed!

What we’re building: Cognyx designs groundbreaking SaaS technology to help organizations accelerate their time-to-market, reduce manufacturing errors, and streamline engineering processes. Leveraging the power of Knowledge Graphs and AI, Cognyx enhances engineers’ daily work by reconciling Product & Engineering data across different systems, helping them to collaborate faster, and automate some of their engineering work.

Where we come from: Cognyx is an early-stage VC-backed tech company. It was born just a few months ago, in Sept-23, from repeat founders Matthias & Deon. They partnered up with OSS Ventures, a leading startup studio that successfully launched 20 software startups in the Manufacturing space, including category-defining companies such as Fabriq and Mercateam. After a fast take-off in Sales, securing major contracts just a few months after inception, Cognyx quickly secured a significant pre-seed funding round from a major VC (soon to be announced), and a panel of renowned business angels from the Tech and Manufacturing spaces.

Who we are: today, Cognyx is mostly composed of its 2 senior cofounders along with employees of OSS Ventures who helped us build the 1st version of our tech. By joining us in the very early days, that means you will be part of our “Founding Team”: your individual contribution will have a decisive impact and define our future trajectory. During the next months, we will also get to define the company culture together — and we do aim to create one where it’s (really) good to work. Among the values we already established in our short life as cardinal: Team spirit (we will fail or succeed as a group), Excellence (we don’t settle for “mediocre” or “average”), Sincerity (we tell the truth to others, and to ourselves).

To find out more: you can visitour website orLinkedin page! You can also learn more about our original startup studioOSS Ventures

About the role

Why we need you ?

Cognyx is a powerful platform, solving highly complex organizational and engineering challenges. However, it is not a simple “off the shelf” SaaS solution. The success of our Product lies in our ability to understand the intricacies of Hardware engineering, the specificity of manufacturing data structures, and the detailed workflows of a complicated value chain from design to production. Not only do we need to understand things as they are today, but also as they should be tomorrow — if they were not constrained by existing silos & legacy technologies.

We are looking for an outstanding professional who can not only understand these unique customer needs, but who can also shape our product strategy to meet these needs and work closely with our engineering team to bring this strategy to life.

What you’ll do ?

In a nutshell: As our Founding Product Manager, you’ll be responsible for setting the product vision and strategy, and driving the product development in order to deliver outstanding impact and satisfaction for our Enterprise clients. This will require understanding customer needs, working with the engineering team to build and refine our product, and working closely with our Sales team (= currently our CEO) to bring our Product to market. Your mission is to compile fragmented data points and disconnected streams of thoughts into cohesive understanding. What the most important problem is, what the data means, what the Product truly needs next, what the structure of information should be, how and when AI should be incorporated, what users are motivated by… in short, where the maximal impact is. Then, you should be able to translate this vision into actionable, best-effort technology for a clear fast impact, through the delivery of the technological backlog. And lastly, to execute Product operations in order to move towards these goals. 

Broadly speaking: the Founding Product Manager is a strategic role that requires a deep understanding of our market, customers, and technology. You will be responsible for shaping the product roadmap, removing all blockers to make sure it is delivered timely, and ensuring as a result that our Product meets and exceeds customer expectations.

On a day to day basis, as a Founding Product Manager, you can expect to:

• Define and drive the product strategy and roadmap, based on a deep understanding of our customers, market, and technology.

• Work closely with the engineering team to build and refine our product, ensuring that it meets customer needs and is easy to deploy.

• Deeply interact with clients and users to understand their needs, gather feedback, and ensure that our product is delivering value.

• Champion and pilot the adoption of Agile methodologies, particularly sprint planning and retrospectives, to improve product development processes and ensure timely delivery of product features.

• Translate all of the above into maximal-impact features through discussions with our tech team, while minimizing the technical effort to get there.

• Build all relevant deliverables needed to accelerate clarity and alignment in our Product efforts (eg. Roadmap, wireframes, Figma’s, designs, benchmarks, etc). 

Although this is less central to your role, you will also be expected to:

• Compile various different information streams (competition, client discussions, adjacencies, internal feedback) to have a clear picture of where the product stands, and where it should go to gain more value and more differentiation;

• Collaborate with the sales team to bring our product to market, ensuring that our product messaging and positioning is compelling and accurate. 

• Collaborate with customer success and support teams to understand customer issues, and work with the engineering team to sort them out quickly;

• Participate in product-focused Sales calls, or even jump in deployment processes when extra hands are needed on deck!

Who you’ll be working with:

As one of our very first employees, you can expect to work closely with each member of our “Founding Team”, a team of 8-10 people who will define our technology, our culture, our value proposition, our processes. This should be an exciting human & professional experience!

You’ll be reporting into Matthias, our CEO. Matthias is a very experienced founder, with proven leadership skills acquired during his 20 years of experience in Tech.

Why it’ll be fun & interesting to do with us:

Because… there is no one else doing this job! You’ll be an essential reason why the Product is a stunning one — or just average.

We will also put a strong emphasis on making sure you are building new skills, whether in terms of hard skills, tech abilities and leadership. Our experienced founding team will be there to provide extensive guidance & coaching.

What’s next?

As one of our very first employees and a member of our “Founding Team”, there will be many opportunities to grow in expertise and/or leadership in the months & years to come. Cognyx aims at a high growth rate, so this could come as fast as 6-12 months from now!

We’re looking for a talented, driven and ambitious professional. We think the necessary skills to succeed are the following, by order of importance:

• Experience in Product: 5-10y of experience, with evidence of strong contribution to an outstanding software Product (B2B SaaS and/or Enterprise will be a plus), ideally with AI features (if not, a strong understanding of AI will be required). 

• “Early-stage compatibility”, defined as:

  • an ability to get things done quickly in a limited resource context 

  • a capacity to deliver a “360° Product work” : you can write a Roadmap, but also deliver Wireframes, Figma’s, copy’s, etc. to move things forward 

  • a strong understanding of the rapid iterations needed to build and scale a product from the ground up.

• Ability to understand complex business contexts, as evidenced by academic training in a highly scientific area (mechanical engineering would be a plus), on-the-job experience on a data-intense product or area (finance, engineering, medical…), high interest in technologies (e.g. in learning & mastering important technological pieces with a history of deep-diving into technical details)… 

• Curious, analytical and synoptic mindset: ability to solve open-ended problems in unstructured environments. Making sense of complex data points and ability to synthesize it into a massive.

• Strong communication skills: ability to clearly and effectively communicate product plans, benefits, and results, to a variety of audiences

Customer-centric mindset: empathetic to customer needs and dedicated to delivering the best possible user experience.

We kindly advise you to turn back if…

• You’re not an entrepreneurial profile: self-driven, autonomous, dynamic. You need to be comfortable with uncertainty, frequent change and a certain degree of improvisation. You like taking on new tasks that weren’t mentioned on this job desc. This is especially true for our Founding Team!

• You’re not fully comfortable working in French and English (our team is international from day 1)

• You’re not looking for a positively challenging job. Clearly, this is not an easy job. Although we pay a close attention to work & life balance (see below), we realize that we are addressing a complex problem, for demanding clients, and that our mission is a very hard one. “Average” or “good” won’t cut it: we need “outstanding” and “excellence”.

• You’re not a do-er : look around… there is no one else to do your job! :) You will not have an army of direct reports that you can push your todo’s to. You should find satisfaction and pride in doing things yourself — at least for 6-12 months until the team starts scaling.

Final words to our candidates!

WFH or in-office?

At Cognyx, aligning with our values and culture means embracing the energy of working together, especially for members of our “Founding Team” in the critical early months of our company. While understanding that “life” happens and requires some flexibility (= 1-2 days WFH per week), we’re convinced that in-person collaboration sparks creativity and drives innovative outcomes. To enhance this connection, we encourage all employees to work mostly from our offices, or from our clients’ offices when necessary to accelerate feedback loops.

Work & Life balance: yes, it’s a thing.

At Cognyx, we understand the importance of work-life balance, especially for our employees who are parents. Our CEO, a father of 2 young children, is a testament to our commitment to create a flexible and supportive environment for all. We believe in the importance of being there for our families and we strive to provide flexible schedules where possible. We always encourage our employees to take the time they need for their personal lives, as we understand that a balanced life leads to longer tenures, increased productivity and happiness in the workplace.

We welcome all candidates!

Cognyx is dedicated to fostering a culture of diversity, equality, and inclusion. We invite candidates from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences to apply as we strive to solve Manufacturing’s most challenging problems. We recognize that not all candidates will meet every requirement; we value your unique contributions and encourage you to apply even if you do not check all the boxes.

Cognyx is committed to ensuring our job application process is accessible to everyone. If you have a disability, whether visible or not, and require any reasonable accommodations at any stage of the application or hiring process — or within the job itself — please contact us so we can provide the necessary support.

Please use the form of this website to apply. After this, here’s what you can expect:

1. Quick intro discussion on reciprocal fit (30 min Call, with CEO)

2. Deep-Dive into your career & past achievements (1.5hr F2F, with CEO)

3. Case-Study requiring home preparation (1hr F2F, with CEO + guests) 

4. Final cultural fit & wrap-up discussion (45 min Call, with CEO) 

5. Reference check (2-3 calls – note: you’ll also be allowed to run this on us :) 

6. Final board approval (might require 1 more quick call)