Senior Product Manager, Istari

• This is a role for someone ambitious who wants real ownership
• You don’t need to be able to administer a Kubernetes cluster, but a conversation about one shouldn’t scare you — you need enough technical depth that engineers trust your judgment and customers trust your answers
• You don’t need to have run a business or owned a massive roadmap. You do need to be comfortable in a room with senior stakeholders — a customer’s chief engineer, a program executive, our leadership team — and able to hold your own
• We hire for judgment, curiosity, and a bias toward action more than for a specific degree or years of experience. That said, people who do well in this role tend to share a few things:
• 4+ years of product management experience at a company known for shipping excellent product at speed — think Stripe, Ramp, Datadog, or an equivalent high-caliber environment
• A track record of taking complicated, ambiguous features from idea to shipped with minimal direction. You’ve been handed a hard problem and come back with a good answer
• Comfort in technical domains. You’ve built products for technical users, or products with real infrastructure underneath them, and you can go deep enough to earn an engineer’s trust
• Strong customer instincts. You’d rather talk to five users than read fifty tickets, and you know how to turn research into decisions
• Directness. When asked for your best guess, you give it — you don’t hedge. You’d rather say “we’re doing this wrong, here’s what I’d do instead” than make people guess what you think
• Speed and ownership. You take responsibility for outcomes, not activity, and you move fast enough that the team never waits on you

Desirable

• Istari is a platform for sharing and working on engineering data in highly regulated, no-fail industries — where a mistake can cost a mission, an aircraft, or a life
• No single team builds a fighter: the airframe comes from a prime, the engine from one supplier, the radar from another, and the teams are separated by geography, classification level, corporate boundaries, and an ecosystem of software tools. Istari keeps their models, simulations, and test results connected so they can move fast and not break things
• We’re hiring a Senior Product Manager to own a significant piece of that platform end to end. You’ll take a set of features that each solve a real problem and turn them into a product that hangs together — one coherent story for the customer, one coherent roadmap for the team
• You’ll get a problem space, direct access to customers, and a strong engineering team. From there, we expect you to figure out what matters: talk to users, find the shape of the problem, decide what to build and in what order, and carry it through to shipped. You’ll work directly with our Head of Product on strategy — your job is to bring a clear point of view to that conversation, not to wait for one
• The domain is technical and we like it that way. Our users are systems engineers building spacecraft, hypersonic vehicles, and submarines. A single customer problem might span extracting proprietary CAD files into vendor-neutral formats, sharing data across air-gapped environments, and automatically re-checking mission requirements on every revision — which means our product touches engineering tools, SDKs, APIs, workflows, and secure infrastructure
• Own a product area end to end: define what success means, build and manage the roadmap, and make the calls on what to build next and what not to build at all
• Take a collection of features and create coherence — a product customers understand and a narrative the company can sell
• Do real customer research: get in front of users, understand their workflows and constraints, and turn what you learn into product decisions
• Work day to day with a senior engineering team — write crisp specs, make fast decisions when they’re blocked, and protect their time from everything that isn’t the work
• Partner with our Head of Product on strategy: bring the evidence, argue for a direction, and help decide where the product goes next
• Communicate with senior stakeholders inside and outside the company — customers, sales, leadership — and represent your area credibly to all of them
• You will work directly with the executives and engineers building the company, not through layers of process. You will see your work reach real programs and real missions quickly — the products you ship here end up in test events and fielded systems, not slide decks — and you will have room to shape both the product and the product function itself
• This is a small team solving a problem that matters, and we are looking for people who want to build the next chapter of it with us