Senior Vehicle Transition & Readiness Manager – Vehicle Lifecycle Projects

About the role

As a Vehicle Transition & Readiness Manager, you are responsible for planning, coordinating, and executing vehicle transitions between development, testing, pilot, and operational phases, while ensuring that all vehicles meet technical, safety, regulatory, and operational readiness requirements. You ensure that vehicles are tested, validated, approved, and released in a controlled and traceable manner, minimizing operational risk and ensuring readiness for deployment into live service or customer use.

What you'll do

• Own end-to-end vehicle transition planning and execution across development, testing, pilot deployment, operations, and decommissioning/re-testing.
• Define transition gates, readiness criteria, and stage-specific checklists to ensure technical and operational preparedness.
• Set the vehicle testing strategy (functional, integration, operational acceptance, safety/compliance) and ensure fit-for-purpose coverage.
• Plan and coordinate test campaigns with internal teams and external partners, including objectives, timelines, and acceptance criteria.
• Drive cross-functional alignment between engineering, validation, quality/safety/compliance, operations, service, and fleet management.
• Proactively manage dependencies, risks, and escalations to minimize operational impact and maintain delivery commitments.
• Coordinate required sign-offs and lead controlled, traceable release decisions (including final go/no-go where applicable).
• Standardize and continuously improve transition/testing processes, incorporating lessons learned and enabling scale across fleets/regions.

What you'll need

• Hands-on experience in automotive launch, industrialization, or transition management, with direct involvement in moving vehicles from pre-series into steady-state operations.
• Strong understanding of pre-series vehicles and early fleet deployment activities, including service readiness, spare parts availability, and operational support requirements.
• Proven ability to capture, document, and institutionalize learnings from prototypes and early builds, translating them into scalable operational and service standards.
• Experience in defining and executing structured testing and validation approaches for operational and service processes prior to and following the start of production.
• Solid understanding of the end-to-end vehicle value chain, including the downstream impacts of engineering and launch decisions on service, uptime, and operating cost.
• Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in environments with incomplete standards, evolving requirements, and high ambiguity, while driving clarity and alignment.

What they offer

• Competitive salary (including bonus)
• Hybrid work setup with flexibility to work from home or offices
• Flexible working hours and work arrangements
• Remote work from outside Germany for up to 6 weeks per year from over 35 countries
• 30 vacation days, sabbatical and unpaid leave option
• Learning environment with continuous learning days, trainings, workshops, coaching, and language classes