Senior Product Manager

Job description

**About the Institute of Foundation Models** We are a dedicated research lab for building, understanding, using, and risk-managing foundation models. Our mandate is to advance research, nurture the next generation of AI builders, and drive transformative contributions to a knowledge-driven economy. As part of our team, you’ll have the opportunity to work on the core of cutting-edge foundation model training, alongside world-class researchers, data scientists, and engineers, tackling the most fundamental and impactful challenges in AI development. You will participate in the development of groundbreaking AI solutions that have the potential to reshape entire industries. Strategic and innovative problem-solving skills will be instrumental in establishing MBZUAI as a global hub for high-performance computing in deep learning, driving impactful discoveries that inspire the next generation of AI pioneers. **The Role** As the **Senior Product Manager** for our teams, you will work within the extreme ambiguity of frontier research and impose the rigor and focus required for high-velocity delivery. You will partner with Lab Leadership to define the product vision for our model families (LLMs, reasoning, world models) and the applications built upon them. This product vision and leadership will be integral to achieving successful, high-quality releases of state-of-the-art models for the global community. Concurrently, you will lay the groundwork for our Product Management organization. You will define the holistic product vision for the lab, determining not just what we build, but who we build it for. As the team scales, you will hire, mentor, and manage the Product Managers responsible for individual model families, setting the standard for excellence across the board. ### Key Responsilities - **Product Vision & Strategy** - **Define the "North Star":** Partner with Lab Leadership to synthesize disparate research tracks into a cohesive, lab-wide Product Strategy. Ensure our various model families (LLMs, reasoning, world models) tell a unified story. - **User-Centric Roadmap:** You are the voice of the user in the research lab. Whether our target is an academic researcher, an open-source hacker, or an enterprise CTO, you must define the specific personas for each model and ensure the product roadmap solves their actual problems (not just theoretical ones). - **Ecosystem Thinking:** Treat the model as a platform. Define the requirements for model capabilities, serving endpoints, APIs, and demo applications to ensure our models are usable, accessible, and impactful from Day 1. **Execution & Shipping** - **Drive Shipping as a Habit:** Instill a culture of relentless execution. converting "research timelines" (flexible) into "product timelines" (committed). Manage the tension between research exploration and shipping deadlines. - **Technical Translation:** Bridge the gap between the Research, Data, and Engineering teams. Translate complex technical constraints (compute budgets, data availability) into clear trade-off decisions. - **Force-Rank Priorities:** Ruthlessly prioritize features and evaluations to ensure the team is always working on the critical path to release. - **Own the Release Criteria:** Define what "Done" looks like. Establish and enforce the benchmarks for performance and safety required for a public release. - **Cross-Functional Collaboration:** Support the synchronization between Research, Engineering, Marketing, and Production. You help to ensure that engineering timelines, marketing beats, and model training schedules are aligned, preventing silos from slowing down the release. **Organizational Leadership & Team Building** - **Build the PM Engine:** You will be the architect of the Product Management function and will define the operating principles for existing and future Product Managers. - **Manage & Scale:** As the team grows, you will transition into leading the Product Management organization, managing the Product Managers dedicated to specific model families. You will be responsible for their output, growth, and alignment with IFM’s mission. - **Storytelling & Influence:** You are a strong communicator who can align executives, researchers, and partners around a clear narrative of why a product exists. You excel at turning ambiguity into prioritized backlogs, enforcing hard trade-offs, and driving tight experiment loops to get to the right answer faster. **Academic Qualifications** - A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, or a related technical field. (MBA or advanced technical degree is a plus, but shipping record matters more). **Professional Experience - Minimum** - **7+ years** of relevant industry experience, with at least 3 years in Product Management for technical, backend, or platform products. - **Proven "Shipper":** You must have a portfolio of complex technical products you have successfully launched from 0 to 1. - **Strategic & User Insight:** Demonstrated ability to take a piece of complex technology and find its product-market fit. You can articulate why a user needs a specific feature and back it up with data or intuition. - **Leadership Potential:** Experience mentoring junior Product Managers or leading cross-functional initiatives. You are ready to build and lead a team. - **Technical Fluency:** You do not need to write the code, but you must understand the stack. You can discuss context windows, inference latency, and specific benchmarks with researchers without a translator. **Professional Experience - Preferred** - **Foundation Model Experience:** Experience working specifically with LLMs, Generative AI, or ML Infrastructure. - **Research-to-Product Transition:** Experience working in a research lab or R&D environment, specifically managing the transition of research artifacts into production-grade assets. - **Open Source Strategy:** Familiarity with the open-source AI ecosystem (Hugging Face, vLLM, etc.) and experience managing open-source community releases. - **People Management:** Prior experience directly managing Product Managers is a strong plus.