Squad Operations Manager

Transform 800,000 hectares of greenhouses into fully-autonomous unmanned food production sites

At Eternal, we're building the future of sustainable food production. Our mission is to convert the world's existing greenhouses into unmanned facilities that can produce fresh food year-round - addressing the critical need to double food production by 2050 while facing severe labor shortages, water scarcity, and climate challenges.

About the Role

We are looking for a Squad Operations Manager (SOM) to serve as the project manager for our engineering team. Based in Bengaluru, you'll be responsible for enabling our product squads to work at maximum speed and effectiveness, ensuring that projects are scoped, tracked, and delivered on time. This is not a back-office role — you'll be embedded directly with our technical teams, making sure the "machine" of engineering runs smoothly while the engineers focus on building groundbreaking robotics solutions.

You'll work with modern project management tools like Linear and Github, coordinate across Cologne (DE) and Bengaluru (IN) locations, and keep leadership up-to-date on progress and blockers.

This role is ideal for someone with 3–5 years of project management or program management experience, preferably in software, robotics, or other deep-tech environments, who thrives on clarity, structure, and cross-functional collaboration.

What You'll Do

• Own project execution: Serve as the project manager for one or more engineering squads, ensuring work is properly scoped, prioritized, and executed.
• Implement tools and processes: Use project management tools like Linear or Jira to set up workflows, track progress, and provide visibility to leadership.
• Enable engineers: Free up engineers to focus on solving hard robotics & computer vision problems by ensuring their work is well-structured, dependencies are managed, and blockers are resolved quickly.
• Coordinate across teams: Act as the bridge between AI/ML engineers, robotics engineers, and leadership to make sure deliverables are aligned and nothing slips through the cracks.
• Drive accountability: Establish clear ownership of tasks, timelines, and outcomes, and track against them with rigor.
• Communicate progress: Prepare regular updates for leadership, surfacing risks and highlighting successes.
• Support global collaboration: Work closely with our offices across locations to ensure seamless coordination between time zones, following Eternal's "follow-the-sun" model.
• Continuously improve: Identify gaps in our engineering workflows and implement process improvements that increase velocity and quality.

Qualifications
Core Requirements (All Levels)

• 3–5 years of professional experience in project management, program management, or squad operations, ideally in software, robotics, or other engineering-heavy fields.
• Strong familiarity with Jira, Linear, or equivalent tools, and the ability to design and run project workflows.
• Proven track record of managing complex projects with multiple stakeholders and deadlines.
• Exceptional organizational skills and attention to detail — you love bringing clarity to complexity.
• Strong communication skills — able to communicate equally well with engineers and leadership.
• Proactive problem-solver with a bias for action; you anticipate issues before they become blockers.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced startup environment where priorities can shift quickly.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience in robotics, AI/ML, or deep-tech companies.
• Agile / Scrum certification or equivalent.
• Experience coordinating across global teams.
• Something distinctive that sets you apart — whether that's leading a major product rollout, implementing innovative workflows, or scaling a project management system from scratch.

Why Eternal?

Shape how we scale: This is a chance to design and own the project management backbone of a robotics company. You'll set up processes, tools, and ways of working that will define how Eternal's engineering teams deliver at scale.

Build from scratch: Rather than inheriting a legacy system, you'll implement and refine workflows that enable a fast-moving, global engineering team to operate with clarity and focus.

Impact at Scale: Your work will directly contribute to solving global food security challenges. We're building technology to transform 800,000 hectares of greenhouses worldwide into sustainable, autonomous food production facilities.

Growth Opportunity: Join as we scale from proof-of-concept to global deployment and shape the DNA of how the company executes for years to come. Be part of the core team shaping the future of horticultural automation.

Flexible Work Culture: Distributed team with offices in Cologne and Bengaluru, following a "follow-the-sun" support model for our 24/7 operations.

Apply Now

Ready to revolutionize how the world grows food? Join us in building autonomous systems that will feed billions while conserving resources and eliminating the dependency on seasonal labor.

We're committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds and experience levels who are excited about our mission and show potential to grow with us. Recent graduates - don't let experience requirements hold you back; we value passion, potential, and fresh perspectives.

Eternal is building unmanned food production sites that can sustainably produce fresh food year-round. Backed by world-class investors and partnering with leading agricultural companies, we're turning the vision of fully-autonomous unmanned greenhouses into reality.

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