Founding Product Lead

Founding Product Lead - $175 - $225 + equity - LA or San Diego

Traditional firms often buckle under the weight of a security compromise, whether it’s the delegation of responsibility for different areas of the attack, mitigating data loss and running services or simply providing comms to market, it’s either too slow, not comprehensive enough, or not well practiced despite having plans in place.

This is where my client steps in in terms of their incident response simulator. Hyper-customised, providing businesses with a fully scoped environment from which they can run live incidents and outages and measure the efficacy of how a business responds, reporting back on the good and the areas for improvement all within a simulated environment, preparing you for the unexpected down the line.

Thanks to strong investment, sustained growth, and an already impressive product, they’re now looking for a Founding product lead to join their west-coast team on a full-time basis (ideally within commutable distance of LA or San Diego).

You’ll join as employee #3 within a team of 5, working directly with the founders and the engineer having a genuine say in what gets built, how customer problems become product priorities, and how what you design plays out in a live, bespoke environment for customers at different stages and within different industries. For them currently, product is a bit of a bottleneck so someone who can get stuck in and build out a wider function would be ideal.

With this, they're looking for someone who has genuinely owned product end-to-end - not just written requirements or run a backlog, but sat with customers, turned what they say into what gets built, designed it hands on in Figma, and tested it themselves before it shipped. You don't need to be from a security company per say but what matters is the track record of ownership from discovery through to shipped outcomes, in both a startup and an enterprise context.

Why I hear you ask?

Well, most AI systems can probably give a good/convincing simulation experience, but it takes someone who deeply understands how enterprise buyers evaluate trust, quality and reliability to know whether the workflow actually holds up, where the design needs to flex for different industries, and how to turn ambiguous customer feedback into a coherent, prioritised roadmap.

To do this, they’re looking for engineers with experience across the following:

• Owning product direction - understand the users, buyers and their business objectives along with technical constraints. You can recommend what we can build, why it matters to them and the parameters to measure product-fit success.
• Be able to lead on the discovery - interviews, exercises, evidence, testing and be able to distinguish needs between one-off requests.
• A strong hands-on portfolio in Figma - complex workflows, interaction decisions, prototypes and shipped outcomes, not brand or marketing design
• Direct experience working with enterprise customers and design partners, including senior stakeholders
• Current, practical fluency with AI products and tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor etc), and judgement on where AI genuinely adds value versus and importantly - when it doesn't.

Process: 30-min introductory call – panel interview with wider business – walk through of a personal project

Ultimately for the firm this is a crucial role that owns usability, acceptance testing, errors, permissions, accessibility and sign offs prior to release

N.B – this role cannot offer sponsorship / transfer at this time.