Technical Product Engineer (SaaS) - Social Media Publishing and Community Management

🎤 Who we are:

Swat.io is a Software-as-a-Service product that supports marketers in Social Media Publishing and Community Management. We are proud to be an independent, self-financed, product-led company, focused on building a product that users actually love. We follow a self-service-first approach and intentionally avoid aggressive sales tactics, putting user experience and value at the center of everything we do.

We’re a small, dynamic, and at the same time stable company with more than 15 years of bootstrapped success. Things move fast here, and good ideas don’t get stuck in meetings. They get heard and turned into action. Around 50 people from different backgrounds work together in a lean, agile way, with a lot of trust and personal responsibility.

We’re an ambitious team with big goals and a strong focus on sustainable growth. We aim to become one of the top 1% of SaaS companies with over €10 million in ARR. Guided by our values: We add value, We drive progress, We own it, We thrive together, we put quality over quantity. We believe that revenue follows quality, not the other way around.

🦄 Who you are:

You are an accomplished Software Engineer with solid product management experience and a deep understanding of the product lifecycle and user value. You have a clear engineering background and think like a product owner, capable of translating user needs into scalable technical specifications and driving them to launch.

You will join our Product Team, serving as the critical link between user needs, product design, and engineering execution. You possess a strong user-first mindset, but your core expertise is scoping, technical architecture, and shipping high-quality software on time. You are comfortable writing code, debating technical trade-offs with engineers, and guiding a cross-functional team by providing a clear, executable plan.

Your primary focus is ensuring that what we build is technically sound, feasible, and delivered in the smallest meaningful increments.

🙅 Who you are not:

This is not a purely coding role, nor is it a traditional Product Manager position. We are not looking for someone who simply manages a backlog or hands down product requirements without a deep understanding of the implementation details. This isn’t a role for someone early in their product career or looking to move into leadership soon. If you prefer defining abstract roadmaps over hands-on technical problem-solving and delivery, this is not the right fit.

💡Purpose of the role:

Your job is to act as the technical compass for our product initiatives. You will bring a high degree of technical clarity, structure, and focus, ensuring we build the right thing, the right way, and at the right speed. You are directly responsible for the technical scoping and velocity of our cross-functional projects, unblocking the engineering team and ensuring we consistently scope small and ship often.

That will also include:

• Define and own the technical specifications and scope for new features, ruthlessly prioritizing to ensure the quickest path to a meaningful release.
• Guide Execution and serve as the technical expert and product partner, helping the team break down large initiatives into small, iterable, and shippable tasks that align with our 5-week development cycles.
• Work directly with the development team to clarify API needs, architectural approaches, and technical trade-offs. You will ensure decisions balance long-term architecture with immediate delivery goals.
• Validate technical feasibility and suggest implementation strategies that reduce complexity and debt by actively pairing with designers and product managers early in the discovery phase.
• Take full technical ownership of major product initiatives from initial technical discovery through to production delivery, ensuring smooth, fast, and high-quality deployment.
• Translate complex technical requirements and API interactions (OAuth flows, webhooks, rate limiting) into clear documentation and specifications for both internal teams and external communication.

We expect you to:

• Actively shape how we work by bringing in ideas to improve collaboration, prioritization, and focus right from the beginning
• Take full ownership of major product initiatives, lead them from discovery to delivery, and ship meaningful projects within your first few months
• Make data-informed decisions: monitoring feature adoption and trends, challenging assumptions, deriving improvement potentials, and always asking "why" before we build. Make data‑ and architecture‑informed decisions, validating assumptions with logs, metrics, and experiment results.

🦸 Are you ready for this?

We define ready as 

• 5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer, or 3+ years in a dedicated Product Engineer role, and solid product management experience in a SaaS environment.
• Clear and demonstrable experience with technical scoping, estimation, and successful end-to-end shipping of features within a set timeline.
• You are highly proficient in at least one modern programming language and understand complex cloud architectures, data schemas, and API design.
• You can read, reason about, and troubleshoot platform limitations and technical concepts like API documentation, OAuth flows, webhooks, and rate limiting.
• You are pragmatic about what to build and when, focused on purpose over perfection, and skilled at reducing scope to ensure shipping velocity.
• You understand software development processes and can effectively manage the technical backlog and project dependencies.
• You’ve worked on building AI-powered product features and understand the full development cycle from selecting the right models and designing prompts to delivering a smooth, valuable experience for users.
• You make data- and architecture-informed decisions, validating assumptions with logs, metrics, and experiment results.
• You are fluent in English and confident in communicating complex technical rationale to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice-to-haves:

• Technical understanding/technical background (e.g., degree in Computer Science) (already emphasized, but worth retaining).
• Experience with social media platforms and the specific technical challenges they present.
• German language skills.

If this opportunity catches your eye and you are passionate about the field of work, we are happy to receive your application. If we both think we are a good match, and team fit is as important to us as a technical fit, we will find a solution and grow together.

Please note: we can only consider candidates who are currently residing in the EU and have the legal right to work here, as visa and relocation support are not available for this position.

❤️ What you’ll find:

• Personal development: An exciting area of responsibility with high autonomy and opportunity to bring your ideas and improvements to shape our product. 
• Annual learning & development budget: You’ll receive €1,000 per year and 4 additional days off for professional or personal development.
• Professional equipment: We’ll equip you with everything you need: MacBook, smartphone, headset, and more.
• Salary: Permanent contract with a gross annual salary starting from EUR 70.000,- for a 38.5-hour work-week, depending on your level of experience and demonstrated expertise. Overtime will be compensated as time off. 
• Flexibility: We work with a flexible hours model with no core working hours that allows you to shape your workdays around your needs and those of your team and customers. 
• Remote-friendly model: You can comfortably work full-remote from your country and/or from our Vienna office. Whatever works best for you, as long as you are located in Europe. You can also work abroad from anywhere in the world for up to 3 months per year - just keep time zones in mind.
• Family-friendly: We guarantee your job after parental leave and offer truly flexible working hours and models. Around 40% of our team members are parents, showing how seriously we take work-life balance.
• Team spirit: At Swat.io, we are makers who excel at what we do while caring for each other’s well-being and creating a supportive environment. We have regular team collaboration activities and bi-annual company events that bring all Swaties from around the world together to connect and celebrate in Vienna. If you are located outside of Vienna, we will support your travel costs. 
• Public transport support: If you’re based in Austria, we support you with a yearly public transport ticket (Vienna public transport pass or a portion of the KlimaTicket).

🥞 Our stack and our Process:

Your contact people are Jane, our Talent Partner, and Roman, our Head of Product and the direct manager for this role.

The preferred starting date is asap, but we are ready to wait for our perfect candidate.

Check out our job ad on our website to meet your Product team and learn more about our stack, how we work, and our recruiting process 😉

We are proud to have an inclusive workplace environment that will foster your development, no matter your gender, civil status, family status, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, education level, or race.

❌ What you won’t find at Swat.io:

• Annoying micro-management
• Office politics
• Lengthy coordination and approval processes
• Monotonous tasks and boring work
• Egos and bullshit before real results