DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH & INNOVATION — INTERIOR EXPERIENCE & SOFTWARE PLATFORMS

I am Cyrille, an Executive Consultant, with over 20 years of experience in executive recruitment and consulting for top-tier companies. Projekts is proud to collaborate with international clients, including Fortune 500 companies, operating in more than 20 countries worldwide.We are currently seeking a DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH & INNOVATION — INTERIOR EXPERIENCE & SOFTWARE PLATFORMSDesigning today the software-defined cabin the world will use tomorrow.THE CONTEXTThe automotive cabin is going through the most profound transformation in its history: it is ceasing to be a driving position and becoming a space of living, attention and experience, one whose perceived value now rests far more on software than on the mechanics of its components alone. With the rise of the Software Defined Vehicle, the consolidation of ECUs into a handful of centralised HPCs, the generalisation of service-oriented architectures and the ability to evolve a vehicle throughout its entire lifecycle through OTA updates, the very rules of value creation are shifting — and that is precisely where this position sits.We are entrusting a visionary leader with the responsibility of defining, embodying and deploying the technology roadmap of a Product Group dedicated to interior experience, with a clearly stated ambition: to bring forward profitable, patentable innovations recognised across the three markets that set the global benchmark — Europe, China and the United States — by intelligently articulating the hardware building blocks (sensors, computing units, displays, acoustics, actuators) with the software layers that alone can turn them into genuinely differentiating uses. This role is aimed at a professional who refuses to choose between vision and execution, and who takes as much pleasure in imagining a breakthrough ten years out as in seeing it travel, step by step, the demanding path that leads from TRL 3 to TRL 5/6 and on to its successful transfer into the product development platforms.YOUR MISSIONSetting the course: innovation strategy and visionYou will design, defend and secure approval for the Product Group's Research & Innovation strategy, building a clear, well-argued and widely shared technology roadmap that gives every one of your stakeholders a transparent reading of what we will be capable of tomorrow and why it will matter. You will identify the major and genuinely disruptive innovation avenues over a three-to-ten-year horizon — embedded artificial intelligence and multimodal models inside the cabin, contextual and predictive human-machine interfaces, in-cabin monitoring and adaptive personalisation, new voice, gesture and haptic interaction modalities — while cultivating an active and demanding technology watch spanning academic laboratories, the start-up ecosystem and the leading consumer digital players alike. You will then feed directly into Strategic Product Planning (SPP) and the Mid-Term Plan (MTP), so that vision translates, year after year, into concrete investment decisions and clearly owned make-or-buy trade-offs.Making software the engine roomYou will drive the software transformation of our platforms, carrying a simple conviction: lasting differentiation in the cabin will be built in software, in data, and in the ability to evolve the experience long after the vehicle leaves the plant. In practical terms, you will steer our research towards modular software architectures, decoupled from the hardware and genuinely reusable from one programme to the next, drawing on the standards that structure today's market: service-oriented architectures, real-time middleware, Android Automotive and embedded Linux environments, containerisation and virtualisation of application domains. You will bring forward embedded AI building blocks capable of operating under tight cost, latency and power constraints, arbitrating with sound judgement between on-device and cloud processing, and you will embed from the earliest research phases the non-negotiable requirements of cybersecurity, functional safety, personal data protection and software quality. Finally, you will install the engineering practices that give the best teams their pace: continuous integration and deployment, simulation and virtual validation, rapid prototyping on benches and digital twins, and the systematic use of field data to prove real-world value ahead of industrialisation.Uniting and steering: leadership, organisation and financial performanceYou will lead a multicultural R&I team based primarily across Europe and China, energising it with the drive and the closeness required to turn a collection of talents into a genuinely cohesive collective around a shared project. You will negotiate annual budgets, adapt the department's organisation to the priorities you set, and ensure rigorous monthly financial follow-up, steering your commitments through shared indicators: TRL milestones, transfer rate into the platforms, patent filings, and the share of work funded through partnerships or public grants. You will map the competencies the entity will need tomorrow — with particular attention to the software expertise most fiercely contested on the market — in order to anticipate both internal development priorities and the recruitment of rare expert profiles, and you will raise the overall performance of the function by installing smoother processes, agile methodologies and, beyond the tools themselves, a genuine culture of innovation that gives everyone both the desire and the legitimacy to put ideas forward.Turning ideas into products: R&I execution and technology transferYou will steer the entire project portfolio, chair the innovation committees and guarantee the rigorous progress of research work, ensuring that each project has the resources, milestones and decision criteria — including stop criteria — that will allow it either to succeed or to release its resources intelligently. You will organise a smooth, unbroken technology transfer between R&I concepts and the product development platforms, formalising the deliverables expected at each handover: architecture documentation, code quality and maintainability, datasets and validation protocols, industrial ramp-up plan. You will multiply synergies with the internal R&I network and the group's other divisions, and you will protect our technological capital by actively steering the intellectual property strategy — patents, but also the control of open source dependencies and licensing — while capitalising, through a structured Lessons Learned approach, on successes as much as on learnings.Opening the ecosystem, and shining outwardYou will deploy an ambitious Open Innovation strategy, identifying, evaluating and then contracting high-level partnerships with universities, laboratories, start-ups, software vendors and major technology players capable of significantly accelerating our work, while capturing national and European public funding opportunities. You will showcase our technology portfolio to carmakers at the events that count — TechDays, CES, international trade shows and conferences — giving our innovations the storytelling and the demonstrators they deserve, you will share our roadmaps with customers to initiate genuine co-innovation programmes aligned with their own electronic and software architecture trajectories, and you will turn that momentum into revenue by proposing targeted, differentiating innovation projects within RFQs and RFIs.THE PROFILE WE ARE LOOKING FORYou have demonstrated, within an international automotive environment, your ability to manage and unite teams spread across several continents and cultures, and you know how to turn that diversity into a competitive advantage rather than a complexity to be managed. You excel at strategic networking — the ability to build, develop and then sustain over time a global network of influence and partners.Above all, you bring a solid and operational software culture that allows you to engage as an equal with system architects, artificial intelligence experts and customer engineering leadership: you understand what a service-oriented architecture, an over-the-air update strategy, a software validation cycle or an on-device-versus-cloud trade-off actually entails, and you know how to draw the consequences in terms of cost, timing and business model. That understanding you place at the service of real-world uses: your appetite for user experience makes you particularly attuned to what is at stake inside the cabin — and well beyond mobility.With a decidedly intrapreneurial temperament, you see innovation as an engine of growth rather than an end in itself, and you take genuine pleasure in turning a technological intuition into a revenue opportunity. Your intellectual curiosity and visionary mindset allow you to articulate a clear mid- and long-term product strategy, which you carry with ease in fluent English within a fully international context.WHAT THIS ROLE OFFERS YOUReal freedom to build: a roadmap to write, an international team to grow, a budget to defend and to steer, a patent portfolio to enrich, and the rare satisfaction of seeing concepts born in the laboratory become, a few years later, experiences lived every day by millions of users across three continents.WHY CHOOSE PROJEKTS TO PROMOTE YOUR CAREER?Strong Partnerships: Projekts maintains strong partnerships with companies in over 20 countries, offering a unique global perspective for you.Global Expertise: With a global presence, Projekts connects you to best practices and exceptional talents worldwide.Personalized Approach: We commit to understanding the specific needs of each client and candidate, offering tailored solutions to achieve their goals.