Engineering Project Manager

About Okra

At Okra Solar, we’re on a mission to bring Power to the People by unlocking opportunities through energy access for everyone in the world.

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Over 650 million people still live without electricity. At a time where technology such as mobile devices, productive agritech and AI are becoming more accessible than ever, we believe that access to energy is the first step toward opportunity and growth.

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That’s why we build our Mesh Grid technology that energizes off-grid households at a fraction of the cost of the other solutions. We build the hardware and software, that we sell to local energy companies who deploy our tech to deliver affordable, reliable electricity as a service last-mile communities.

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Role Overview

As a Senior Engineering Project Manager your superpower is ensuring plans, timelines, and dependencies are mapped out in advance. You’re comfortable in dealing with engineers as you are with customer-level stakeholders, and you understand their competing priorities. You appreciate that long-term hardware development benefits from well-thought planning and problem anticipation, but you can also adapt when the plan changes.

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In this role you would lead cross-functional engineering teams in the development and delivery cycles of our integrated hardware and software product portfolio. We are ramping up our manufacturing capacity from ~10k systems to ~100k systems in the next 2 years, and plan to be hitting >500k volumes in the years to come. This means heightened levels of attention to following good process, optimizing quality, and delivering on time to customers in Nigeria and Haiti. In parallel to ramping production, we will be developing our next-gen product suite, to reduce cost and increase power availability of Mesh Grids. We aim to swap all sales to new hardware in 2027, and your coordination of this effort makes this possible.

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Responsibilities

Project Leadership & Coordination

• Manage complex technical product development timelines, from concept, through first industrialization, to mass production

• Drive cross-functional collaboration between engineering, supply chain, and operations and ensure the scoping, structuring, executing, and closing of engineering projects

• Coordinate between varied seniority engineers in a range of specialized technical disciplines, including: electronic, electrical systems, firmware, mechanical, quality control, field test & repair, full stack development, backend development, front end development

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Technical Planning

• Work with lead engineers to break down complex development projects into manageable work packages with concrete scope and deliverables

• Coordinate required resourcing with managers and tech leads

• Raising / challenging trade-offs, requiring solid technical and business context

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Stakeholder Engagement

• Manage internal/external stakeholder dependencies and commitments

• Align with product managers to ensure needs and schedules are met

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Project Management Technical Skills

• Defining and owning project-level or system-level plans, timelines, budgets, artifacts

• Traceable actions, deliverables, and deadlines, with clear ownership defined and chased to completion

• Assist in logistics tasks to remove roadblocks from the team, including support on quick prototype ordering

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Core Skill Requirements

• Well versed in best practice project management methodologies or guidelines: PMP, Agile Scrum/Kanban, Waterfall, etc, applied to complex hardware and software development

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• Ability to flesh out a long-term schedule and its key milestones; representing it via Gantt charts. Critical path analysis

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• Can define a suitable product tree, derive a WBS and write WPs (assisted by relevant stakeholders)

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• Continuous risk assessment and mitigation planning

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• Proficiency with project management tools (Airtable, Jira, Asana, Linear, or similar)

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Engineering Workflow

• Strong understanding of electronics/hardware development lifecycle (EVT, DVT, PVT) and basic tasks, and can roughly estimate the effort behind these

• Understands ticket/issue breakdown and scoping of key, basic engineering tasks

• Familiarity with software development lifecycles (SDLC: Planning, Analysis, UX/UI design, implementation, testing and integration, maintenance)

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Soft Skills

• Excellent communication skills and ability to work with a cross-cultural, cross-time zone team

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• Collaborative mindset: Ability to work effectively with others, lifting teammates up, learning together, and sharing wins and failures

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• Balanced drive: Passionate about your work while maintaining a healthy pace to avoid burnout and sustain excellence

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• Transparency and openness: Open to sharing and receiving ideas and feedback candidly

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• Integrity and respect: Ability to make ethical decisions even during challenges, acting with honesty and respect

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• Patience and coaching: A willingness to listen, help upskill, and bring people along through times of change

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Required Experience

• Engineering background; bonus if from a complex engineering field, e.g. systems, physics, auto, aero, etc

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• Has been a dedicated PM for over 3 years

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• Has run a hardware product development project via EVT/DVT/PVT methodology, V-model, ESA/NASA, and/or equivalent

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• Experience with contract manufacturing and supplier quality management

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Growth Opportunities

• Working with a Okra’s senior leadership team and extensive network of mentors and advisors (Schneider Electric, AtOne Ventures, Apple)

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• Owning higher level program management at the company-wide operations level (e.g. Sales, Inventory, Operations Planning)

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• Opportunity to directly impact engineering processes, product strategy, and company strategy