Product Manager - Preclinical Device

Protocol Labs, Inc.; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 85,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity in an early-stage company

Central London lab on-site

Direct ownership of product line

Collaborative neuroscience/engineering

Job summary

Netholabs is building integrated human motion-capture and neurophysiological recording systems. We seek a hardware product leader to own the London lab's R&D delivery and hardware program, co-developing with electronics and mechanical engineers, and scaling with contract manufacturers.

You will define requirements, enforce best-practice data capture, and push back when manufacturing constraints clash with research needs.

Qualifications

• Min 3+ years in hardware product management, with several prototypes shipped to volume manufacturing.
• Experience with contract manufacturers, RFQs, NPI builds, and production-line problem solving from remote locations.
• Understanding of OTA updates, telemetry, fleet management and provisioning for devices.

Responsibilities

• Take prototypes to field-deployable systems; define product and roadmap; drive delivery.
• Specify and build over-the-air update infrastructure: firmware, versioning, rollback, fleet management, remote diagnostics.
• Own design-for-manufacture transition; BOM ownership; tolerancing; test fixtures; production test protocols.
• Identify and manage contract manufacturers and suppliers; RFQ to sustained production.
• Establish data capture protocols across modalities to ensure data quality and consistency.

Skills

Product management

Hardware

Vendor management

Technical leadership

Job description

Location: London, with occasional travel.

About Netholabs

Netholabs builds large-scale neural and behavioural recording platforms to generate the data needed for the next generation of brain models. We operate two recording platforms: a preclinical ethological monitoring system integrated with behaviour and neural data and a human motion-capture and neurophysiology platform. We are a small, fast-moving team where hardware, neuroscience, and ML sit in the same room.

The Role

We are building integrated human motion-capture and neurophysiological recording systems for both controlled lab studies and naturalistic, in-the-wild data collection. Today we have working prototypes. We need someone to turn them into products - reproducible, manufacturable, remotely updatable systems that can be deployed at scale and maintained without an engineer in the room.

You will own R&D delivery across the London lab and hardware programme: co-developing the hardware with our electronics and mechanical engineers, importing and enforcing best-practice data capture protocols, and engaging contract manufacturers to scale. This is an agentic, hands‑on role -with support engineer roles as required. You will spend as much time in the lab and on the phone with suppliers as you will in a spec document.

What you'll do

• Take working prototypes to shippable, field‑deployable systems — define the product, own the roadmap, and drive it to delivery

• Specify and build out over-the-air update infrastructure: firmware, versioning, rollback, fleet management, remote diagnostics

• Own the design-for-manufacture transition — DFM/DFA reviews, BOM ownership, tolerancing, test fixtures, and production test protocols

• Identify, qualify, and manage contract manufacturers and suppliers; own the relationship from RFQ through NPI to sustained production

• Establish and enforce best-practice data capture protocols across modalities (EEG, fNIRS, EMG, pupillometry, motion capture, video) so that data quality is consistent across sessions, operators, and sites

• Define the requirements that make in-the-wild collection viable: wearability, session setup time, robustness, battery life, and unattended operation

• Work directly with our electronics, mechanical, firmware, and neuroscience teams to translate research needs into hardware requirements — and push back when a requirement doesn't survive contact with manufacturing

• Build the quality, documentation, and regulatory groundwork (design history, ISO 13485-style discipline, CE/UKCA pathway) appropriate to a research-device product

• Contribute to the industrialisation of our rodent recording platform where the manufacturing and OTA problems overlap

What we’re looking for

Essential

• Min 3+ years (ideal 7+) in hardware product management, product engineering, or programme management, with several products you personally took from prototype to volume manufacture

• Direct, demonstrable experience with contract manufacturers: you have run RFQs, sat through NPI builds, argued about yield, and fixed a production line problem from 6,000 miles away

• Deep understanding of connected‑device architecture: OTA update mechanisms, device provisioning, telemetry, fleet management, and what it costs to get these wrong

• Fluency across electronics, mechanical, and firmware enough to hold a real technical conversation with each - you don't need to design the board, but you need to know when the answer you're getting is wrong

• Track record of writing specifications and protocols that people actually follow

• Comfort with ambiguity and a small‑company reality: no PMO, no roadmap tooling team, no one to delegate the boring parts to

Strongly preferred

• Experience with wearable, biosignal, or medical device hardware

• Familiarity with human research data collection — protocols, participant handling, IRB/ethics, GDPR and special‑category data

• Experience shipping a product to CE/UKCA or FDA pathway

• Background in neuroscience, biomedical engineering, or a related field

• Experience with multi‑sensor time synchronisation and the data infrastructure behind it

What we offer

• Direct ownership of a product line at a company small enough that your decisions ship

• Equity in an early-stage company building foundational infrastructure for brain modelling

• A team of neuroscientists and engineers doing genuinely novel work

• Central London lab, on‑site, with access to the Sussex rodent facility