Hire Digital Product Passport Engineers

What this role actually does

The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, entered into force in July 2024 and establishes the framework for the Digital Product Passport. It does not by itself impose requirements on a specific product; those arrive through delegated acts adopted per product group, with the first working plan prioritising categories such as textiles, iron and steel, furniture and tyres. Batteries are governed separately and earlier by Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, which sets a battery passport obligation from February 2027.

For an engineering team, this becomes concrete work rather than policy reading. Every product instance, batch or model needs a persistent unique identifier. That identifier needs a data carrier — typically a GS1 Digital Link encoded in a QR code or Data Matrix. Behind it sits structured, versioned product data with differentiated access for the public, for repairers, for recyclers and for market surveillance authorities. It must remain available for a defined period, and it must survive the company changing systems or suppliers.

Core skills to look for

• EU ESPR framework literacy: Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 and the delegated act structure
• GS1 standards: Digital Link URI syntax, GTIN and serialisation strategy
• Data carriers: QR and Data Matrix encoding, resolution and print verification
• EPCIS 2.0 event capture and query for lifecycle and supply chain events
• JSON-LD and semantic modelling so passport data is machine-readable and interoperable
• Role-based access control across public, repairer, recycler and authority tiers
• Long-lived data architecture: versioning, immutability and retention
• Supplier data onboarding, which is usually the hardest part in practice

When you need to hire this role

• A delegated act under ESPR will apply to your product category
• You place batteries on the EU market and face the February 2027 battery passport obligation
• Customers or retailers are asking for passport-ready product data ahead of the legal deadline
• Your product data lives across ERP, PLM and supplier spreadsheets with no single identifier
• You need to prove data provenance to an auditor rather than merely assert it

How to assess candidates for this role

1. 01

   Test regulatory literacy precisely

   Ask what ESPR requires today versus what arrives through delegated acts. Candidates who claim a single fixed universal requirement have not read the regulation.

2. 02

   Probe identifier strategy

   Ask whether they would identify at model, batch or item level, and why. The correct answer depends on the product and the delegated act, and good candidates say so.

3. 03

   Check interoperability instinct

   Ask how a recycler in another country would read the passport. Strong answers reach for open standards, not a proprietary portal.

4. 04

   Interrogate the supplier data problem

   Ask how they would obtain material composition data from a tier-two supplier. This is the real bottleneck and experienced candidates know it.

Typical rate bands