Director of Product - Core Platform

Director of Product - Core Platform

Arlington, Virginia, United States; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

Company Description

Air is the leader in Enterprise Readiness. Our mission is to establish readiness as a real-time condition that is continuously achieved. Today, a dangerous Readiness Gap exists between what the front line needs and what is delivered. Our AI-native platform, Air Enterprise Readiness, aligns development, production, delivery, and sustainment into one coordinated execution system for government agencies and industrial suppliers. By revealing true capacity, exposing real constraints, coordinating resources, and executing at the speed of operational demands, the front line gets what it needs to succeed.

Job Description

We are seeking a product leader to build a strategy and execute against a roadmap to mature our platform capabilities, encompassing everything from front-end usability and UI, to backend capabilities like ABAC to how we integrate Agentic AI throughout. This is an individual contributor reporting to the SVP of Product with the potential for managing a team over time. You will be responsible for prioritizing, rationalizing, and integrating existing prototypes into the platform as well as developing new platform capabilities that serve our customers at scale. As a core product manager, you are responsible for thinking broadly across the communities we serve and delivering solutions that provide value to a wide range of customers. You'll partner with persona-aligned PMs, other core PMs, as well as our engagement and implementation teams, to broadly scale "in-the-field" solutions and improve the configurability and adaptability of our platform. You should be highly motivated by striking a balance between building solutions that are robust and scalable, but also meet customer needs.

To do this job well, you must possess exceptional judgment when it comes to identifying opportunities to deliver customer value in a productized way, as well as in the relative prioritization of those opportunities. You must work effectively cross-functionally in often ambiguous circumstances, distilling market opportunities to a clear set of objectives and solutions, and articulating the value of those solutions both internally and externally.

In a typical week, you could expect to:

• Spend several days on site with users, seeking to understand how users across a variety of accounts utilize Air Enterprise Readiness platform to relieve pain points and triangulate the commonalities to build new, valuable workflows in the Air Enterprise Readiness platform.
• Draft clear and compelling articulation of customer problems, and what a good solution to those problems would look like in the Air Enterprise Readiness platform.
• Partner with the persona PMs and go-to-market team to help assess opportunities and understand the degree to which customer requirements align with product capabilities and roadmap
• Define how those solutions deliver value across a wide range of customer environments and determine what features are necessary to support broad adoption of the solution.
• Collaborate with engineering and design teams to deliver the most promising capabilities.

This is a full-time team member position, working in our offices at our Arlington, VA and/or Pittsburgh, PA locations. This role may require up to 50% travel.

Scope of Responsibilities

• Define and prioritize the platform backlog, balancing technical debt with high-impact UI improvements
• Act as the "Internal PM" for our Persona teams, ensuring they have the platform tools (APIs, UI components) they need to build faster
• Spend time with power users to understand where the UI creates "friction" and translate those pains into elegant functional requirements
• Partner with internal engineering and data science teams to scope the expected associated investment costs/timelines, and ensure that the business can deliver on scope, contractual obligations, and agreed-upon timelines
• Facilitate market introduction of new features/functions while balancing tradeoffs of risk, cost, and speed
• Ensure smooth integration of prototyped features/functions into Air for utilization across customer accounts

Qualifications

• U.S. Citizenship is required
• 5+ years of PM experience, specifically in B2B SaaS, ERPs, or highly configurable specialized industry platforms (e.g., FinTech, HealthTech, Construction Tech) platforms
• Fluency in backend systems concepts, including authentication/authorization models, data schemas, service contracts, and distributed system tradeoffs
• Experience in shipping infrastructure or platform services
• Fluency with technical concepts (microservices, distributed systems, caching, permissions models, data schemas, event systems, etc.)
• Familiarity with LLM-based systems and the tradeoffs between deterministic workflows and agentic systems
• Strong information architecture instincts, especially in configurable enterprise environments
• Strong value orientation, understanding of what matters for our customers, and why
• Self-starter, owner mentality
• You have a growth mindset and have worked in a startup or growth-stage environment where you've had to build processes from scratch, not just follow existing ones.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic work environment
• Exceptional written and oral communication skills across all levels of the business
• Bachelor's degree in business or a technology-related field

Desired Skills:

• Current possession of a U.S. security clearance, or the ability to obtain one with our sponsorship
• Experience in or around DoD
• Experience working on low/no-code workflow or application builders
• We firmly believe that past performance is the best indicator of future performance. If you thrive while building solutions to complex problems, are a self-starter, and are passionate about making an impact in global security, we're eager to hear from you.

Air is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and protected veterans status or any other characteristic protected by law.