Senior Product Manager

Tropic Square is a deep-tech company developing the world’s first transparent, auditable security chip. Our engineering team knows how to build it. We need the person who brings the why — the market logic, the customer evidence, and the business case that shapes what goes into the silicon.

TROPIC01, our transparent security chip demo, has been validated by industry leaders, including Trezor. Now we’re building TROPIC02 — a full production chip that will take three years to develop, cost millions to tape out, and set the standard for hardware security for the next decade.

This is not a SaaS roadmap. Every feature decision is etched into silicon — irreversible and enormously expensive to get wrong. Our engineering team owns the technical architecture. Your job is to be the voice of the market inside the building: ensuring we invest our silicon budget in the features that customers will actually pay for.

• Market Intelligence & Segmentation: Analyze the addressable market across IoT, automotive, edge computing, and beyond. Identify the segments and use cases with the highest revenue potential. Build the data-driven business cases that determine where we focus our silicon investment

• Product Strategy & Business-Driven Roadmap: Work with engineering leadership to shape the TROPIC02 product roadmap. Your role is to bring the market perspective: which features unlock which customer segments, what the competitive landscape demands, and where the strongest commercial opportunity lies. Engineering owns the technical how; you own the business what and for whom

• Customer & Market Validation: Engage CTOs and security architects at target enterprises now, before the chip exists. Present demos, validate feature priorities, stress-test pricing assumptions, and secure Letters of Intent. Own the feedback loop between market and engineering

• Milestone Readiness & Trade-Off Decisions: In silicon, missing a tape-out window costs millions. You ensure that at every critical gate — architecture freeze, tape-out, certification — the team has the market and business context needed to make the right trade-offs. You don’t run the engineering schedule; you make sure commercial reality is at the table when irreversible decisions are made

• Ecosystem & Go-To-Market Foundation: Define the ecosystem that makes the chip usable: SDKs, documentation, open-source strategy, and developer relations. Shape early positioning and pricing frameworks that the commercial team will execute on

• Strategic Alignment: Report directly to the CEO. Work closely with our founders to ensure every product decision stays true to our core values of transparency and freedom — while keeping a sharp eye on commercial viability

There’s no single “perfect background” for this role. You might come from product management, product marketing, business development, or strategy — what matters is how you think and work. Here’s the profile we have in mind:

• You think in markets, not just in features. When someone proposes a feature, your first question is “who pays for this and how much?” You’re used to building segmentation models, sizing opportunities, and mapping competitive landscapes. You’d rather kill a feature with weak market evidence than ship one that sounds cool but has no buyer

• You can sit in a room with a CTO and earn trust. You’ve done enterprise customer-facing work before — not necessarily sales, but conversations where you validated product assumptions, stress-tested pricing, or gathered technical requirements from senior decision-makers. You’re comfortable with ambiguity: selling a vision of a product that doesn’t fully exist yet

• You speak enough “engineer” to be dangerous. You don’t need to design a chip. But when an architect explains a trade-off between two approaches, you understand the implications well enough to ask the right follow-up: “How does this affect our certification timeline?” or “Does this open or close the automotive use-case?” You’ve picked this up by working in or around hardware/semiconductor companies for several years

• You make decisions, not just decks. You’ve been in roles where your recommendation actually shaped what got built or what didn’t. You know what it’s like to say “no” to something the team is excited about because the data doesn’t support it. In silicon, these decisions are irreversible — and you’re comfortable with that weight

• You see the whole product, not just the chip. You intuitively understand that a chip without an SDK, documentation, and developer experience is just a piece of sand. You think about the full ecosystem — what needs to exist around the hardware for customers to actually adopt it

What helps you ramp up faster:

• Experience in security, cryptography, or certification (Common Criteria, secure elements, HSMs)

• Exposure to open-source hardware ecosystems (RISC-V, OpenTitan, etc.)

• Startup experience, especially shipping a hardware product from concept to mass production

• Familiarity with semiconductor supply chains, foundry relationships, or tape-out processes

• Legacy: Be the architect of a product that challenges the secretive status quo of the chip industry. Your decisions will be etched in silicon

• Autonomy: Report directly to the CEO. No middle management layers. You shape the product strategy and own the outcomes

• The Team: Work alongside the founders behind Trezor and a world-class engineering team pushing the boundaries of transparent hardware

• Impact: Hardware security underpins everything — from wallets to cars to critical infrastructure. This chip matters

👋 Interested? Submit your CV along with a short cover letter. After initial screening, you’ll be directly in touch with your future team.