Project & Product Lead (m/f/d) – AI for Lifelong Learning

grow.file is building a new infrastructure for making competences visible and usable — across educational phases and areas of life. We are looking for someone who takes ownership: of projects, products, partners, and of turning a good idea into a solution that actually works.

As Project & Product Lead, you start by steering one of our central development projects and grow from there, step by step, into operational responsibility for further grow.file use cases. You work directly with the management and the CTO and play a central part in turning a small founding team into a capable product organisation.

This is not a classic project-coordination role. We are looking for someone who can structure complexity, prepare and make decisions, bring people together and see things through to the finish.

Competence shows itself every day — in playing, learning, solving problems, collaborating, working and coping with new situations. Yet much of it is neither captured systematically nor made usable across educational transitions today.

grow.file is developing an AI-based competence infrastructure that interprets evidence from real situations, derives competences traceably, and makes their development visible over time. Rather than sorting people into rigid checklists, we want a profile that grows with them.

Our approach is lifelong by design:

• Early years & early support. Recognising developmental steps early and giving educators concrete pointers for individual support — scientifically grounded and embedded in existing systems.
• School & teaching. Making visible the strengths and learning progress that grades alone miss, and helping teachers align learning more closely with each learner's actual stage of development.
• Family & everyday life. Giving parents orientation on questions of development and upbringing, while making everyday situations usable as valuable evidence of competence and growth.
• Careers guidance, training & work. Connecting competences from school, internships, training and everyday life into a coherent profile, making development trajectories visible and supporting transitions into internships, training, further education and work.

We do not build these applications as separate products side by side. Our goal is a shared competence infrastructure that connects different applications and existing systems.

One of your first major undertakings is being developed together with partners from vocational rehabilitation. It produces a low-barrier prototype that brings together competence information from different sources, makes development trajectories visible, and supports young people and professionals with reflection and transitions into internships, training and work.

You take operational ownership of this undertaking — from requirements, planning and partner management through to piloting and sign-off.

At the same time, we are building grow.file in further application contexts. As the organisation grows and more projects begin, you will therefore gradually take on responsibility for undertakings in early years, school, family, careers guidance and further education too. We want someone who understands how grow.file works as a whole — and carries that knowledge from one undertaking to the next.

Three things make up the core of your work — and in all three it comes down less to control than to good listening, clear structuring and dependable communication.

You set up undertakings so that it is always clear: What do we want to achieve? What has to be done by when? Who decides what? What dependencies and risks are there? And how do we recognise that a result genuinely works?

You steer schedules, resources, partners, open decisions and risks — and make sure topics don't fall between meetings, tools or responsibilities.

Between a pedagogical idea and working software lie many decisions. You talk to practice partners, users, experts and our team, identify the relevant requirements and translate them into clear product decisions, specifications, user stories and acceptance criteria.

You don't have to be able to build everything yourself. But you should understand well enough how digital products come about to ask the right questions and judge the results.

We work with a small internal team, external development partners and, increasingly, AI-supported development tools. You make sure tasks are described precisely, decisions are documented and development results stay verifiable.

When something doesn't work, you describe it precisely enough that the next task can follow directly from it. And you make sure qualitative feedback turns into robust product decisions — without turning every individual wish unfiltered into a feature.

• at least three years of relevant experience leading or independently steering complex digital development, product or transformation undertakings
• experience in product or requirements management
• experience working with software development, ideally including steering external development partners
• a solid understanding of how software is developed, versioned, tested and shipped
• the ability to structure complex requirements quickly and translate them into concrete decisions and tasks
• very high standards for reliability, documentation and quality
• the ability to run several topics at once without losing the overview or your priorities
• excellent written and spoken German
• a completed degree in a relevant field, or equivalent demonstrated qualification

• experience with AI-based products or AI-native workflows
• experience with agent-supported software development or rapid prototyping
• your own technical or product-oriented development experience
• experience as an early employee in a startup or building a new organisation
• experience in education, vocational rehabilitation, early years, school, further education or the labour market
• knowledge of data protection, digital accessibility or responsible AI
• experience with publicly funded innovation or research projects

You don't need to bring all of these. What matters is that you can lead complex digital undertakings independently and are ready to get up to speed in new domains very quickly.

We don't work through presence or fine-grained control. You get a large area of your own to own — and we expect you to lead it actively. If something is unclear, you make it clear. If a decision is missing, you go and get it. If a risk emerges, you make it visible early. If something doesn't work, you don't wait for someone else to notice.

For us, AI is not only a product subject but a working tool — in research, structuring, prototyping, documentation and development. We expect curiosity and a willingness to use these possibilities actively and develop them further.

At the same time, with AI in particular, we don't care whether a result sounds convincing but whether it holds up. Checking sources, recognising uncertainty, testing results and making decisions traceable belong together for us.

We are a small team and can't afford heavy processes. So we work iteratively, pragmatically and with short decision paths. But speed does not mean carelessness: our products are used in educational and developmental contexts and can influence decisions about people. That is why scientific grounding, data protection, traceability, accessibility and careful quality assurance are part of how we understand our products.

We look for people who can push back when they see a better way. Once a decision is made, though, we expect it to be carried out consistently. We don't want a culture of endless alignment, but one in which good arguments quickly lead to good decisions.

• You arrive very early. You don't step into a finished organisation — you help shape how it comes about, processes, tools, roles and quality standards included.
• You work on a fundamental problem. Knowing your own competences and using them for your own development is the basis of self-directed learning. We want to build an infrastructure that makes that possible at scale.
• You get real creative latitude. The paths between users, product, technology and management are short. Good proposals can be put into practice straight away.
• You work across use cases. What we learn in one context should flow into the next. Early years, school, family and the world of work are not separate silos for us.
• The role can grow with the company. The first project funding provides the entry point. We are filling this position explicitly with the aim of developing it into a long-term operational key role at grow.file.

• 30 hours per week
• Starting as soon as possible
• initially a fixed-term, project-based contract; a long-term collaboration is our explicit goal
• individual contractual pay, oriented to the comparable public-sector remuneration foreseen for the role
• remote-first, with an emerging hub in Leipzig
• direct collaboration with the management and the CTO
• regular exchange with project and practice partners; project-related on-site dates are part of the role