Director, Product and Engineering Operations (m/f/d)

Mission

Create a dependable operating system for product delivery - connecting strategy, planning, delivery and launch.

Mission

Create a dependable operating system for product delivery - connecting strategy, planning, delivery and launch.

Role Overview

The Product Operations director is in a pivotal role to connect strategy, planning, delivery, launch, and product insight. The role serves as a trusted facilitator across product, engineering, and business partners. It creates a dependable planning and execution cadence, turns delivery, manages cross-team risks and dependencies, and drives improvement in the way teams work, while ensuring value is delivered through the product life-cycle. The successful candidate balances operational rigor, technical fluency, and sound judgment in a complex product environment.

Responsibilities

• Planning & Release Cadence: Lead quarterly planning and release rhythms across the portfolio, ensuring teams align on priorities, capacity, and decision milestones.
• Risk & Dependency Management: Proactively identify, track, and resolve cross-team dependencies, risks, and blockers to ensure on-time delivery.
• Cross-Functional Tradeoffs: Partner with Product, Engineering, Architecture, and GTM leaders to evaluate tradeoffs, sequence work, and shape roadmap priorities.
• Operating Standards & Tooling: Define team rituals, documentation standards, and automated tooling/reporting to cut manual overhead and establish common practices.
• Portfolio Insights & Health: Synthesize customer signals, product metrics, and delivery health data into actionable reporting that drives continuous improvement.

Requirements

• Experience: 10+ years in product operations, technical program management, delivery leadership, or related technology roles (Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience preferred).
• Delivery Cadence & Agile: Proven experience running planning and release cycles across multiple teams or value streams (e.g., Release Train Engineer), with deep knowledge of Agile lifecycles and launch operations.
• Risk & Dependency Management: Demonstrated ability to manage complex dependencies, capacity planning, delivery risks, and cross-functional expectations.
• Operational Excellence & Analytics: Strong analytical skills using delivery metrics and dashboards to solve problems, optimize workflows, and improve operating models.
• Influence & Communication: Exceptional facilitation and communication skills, with proven ability to influence without authority across product, engineering, and business partners.
• Domain & Languages: Passion for data science and analytics tools; fluent in English (German and relevant Agile/PMP certifications are a plus)

Leveling

This role sits at Senior Director level and reports directly to the VP Product. It starts as an individual-contributor role, with the potential to grow into a people-leadership position as we scale our R&D capacity. Until then, its influence comes from the operating model, reporting, and cadence it owns rather than from line management. Across the product portfolio, the role acts as the operational counterpart to both the VP Product and the VP Engineering.

About Us

KNIME is a leading AI platform that enables organisations to make sense of their data through intuitive, scalable, and collaborative data science. We empower data professionals and business users alike to build, deploy, and manage AI and data workflows that drive better decisions. Hundreds of global enterprises use the KNIME platform including Citi, Bosch and P&G.

KNIME is an equal opportunity employer. We’re all about providing opportunities for different perspectives to come together, where everyone feels included no matter their background.