Senior Technical Product Manager

Job description

About the role As the Senior Technical Product Manager for OTG (Optical Terminal Guidance) based in Melbourne, you will own the product strategy, market alignment, and commercial success of Arkeus’ cutting-edge autonomous search, detection, and seeker platform. Reporting to the Global VP Product and Marketing, you will serve as the critical link between customers, markets, engineering, and the broader business—ensuring OTG evolves around genuine customer needs and delivers meaningful operational capability. This role is fundamentally a product leadership position. You will define where OTG creates value, identify the highest-impact market opportunities, validate customer requirements, and translate those insights into a clear product vision and roadmap. Working closely with the Technical Lead, and the broader engineering team, you will ensure customer needs are transformed into scalable product capabilities. You will be responsible for understanding OTG’s potential across multiple applications—including search, detection, location, and object identification—and shaping the product around the strongest market opportunities. You will help position OTG not only as a standalone capability, but as part of a broader integrated platform supporting advanced autonomous systems. Your mandate is to drive product-market fit, customer adoption, and commercial growth. You will engage deeply with customers, partners, and industry stakeholders to understand operational challenges, monitor market trends, assess competitive landscapes, and ensure OTG continues to solve the right problems for defence and aerospace markets globally. About you You are an experienced Product Manager with a strong track record of taking complex technology products from customer discovery through development and into market. You understand that great products are built by deeply understanding customer problems, validating market opportunities, and aligning cross-functional teams around clear outcomes. You are commercially minded and customer-focused, with the ability to engage confidently with defence customers, UAV developers, technical stakeholders, and business leaders. You are comfortable asking the right questions, identifying unmet needs, and translating market intelligence into actionable product strategy. You have enough technical depth to work effectively with engineering teams and understand complex systems, but your strength is product leadership—defining the “why” and “what” rather than owning detailed technical execution. You thrive in ambiguous environments where products are still evolving and enjoy building clarity from uncertainty. You are energised by the opportunity to help shape a sovereign deep-tech product, influence global market adoption, and work alongside world-class engineers developing advanced AI, optics, and autonomous systems. Key responsibilities Product Strategy & Vision: Define OTG’s product direction by understanding customer needs, market opportunities, and business objectives. Establish a clear product vision that guides future capability development. Product-Market Fit: Conduct customer discovery, validate use cases, identify reference customers, and continuously assess where OTG is creating value and where improvements are required. Customer & Partner Engagement: Build trusted relationships with customers, prospects, UAV developers, and ecosystem partners. Capture market intelligence and translate customer insights into product priorities. Market Intelligence & Competitive Analysis: Monitor defence, aerospace, autonomous systems, and emerging technology markets to identify opportunities, risks, and competitive positioning. Product Roadmap Ownership: Develop and maintain an outcome-based product roadmap aligned with customer value, commercial objectives, and technical feasibility. Product Development Leadership: Work closely with The Technical lead and the engineering team to translate product strategy into delivered capability, ensuring development efforts remain aligned with customer and market priorities. Commercial Growth: Identify opportunities to expand OTG adoption, grow revenue through reference customers, and support market expansion across defence and autonomous applications. Cross-Functional Leadership: Connect customers, Sales, Engineering, Marketing, and business leadership around shared product objectives and priorities. Platform Thinking: Shape OTG as part of a broader integrated capability, identifying opportunities where the technology can support multiple applications across search, detection, location, and object identification. What Success Looks Like In your first 90 days: You have developed a strong understanding of OTG’s current capability, target markets, customer landscape, and competitive positioning. You have built trusted relationships with customers, prospects, engineering, and business stakeholders. You have identified key product opportunities, gaps, and priority use cases across OTG’s potential applications. You have established a clear view of product-market fit opportunities and contributed to a refined product strategy and roadmap. In your first year: OTG has a clearly defined product strategy and roadmap aligned with customer needs, market opportunities, and business objectives. You have established strong reference customers and validated priority applications for OTG adoption. Customer insights and market intelligence are embedded into the product development process. OTG is positioned as a scalable integrated platform capability with clear commercial opportunities across defence and autonomous systems markets. The product team and engineering organisation are aligned around delivering customer-driven outcomes and accelerating market adoption. Your experience and skills Product Management Leadership: 5+ years of experience in Product Management, Senior Product Management, or equivalent roles owning complex technology products from strategy through delivery and market adoption. Product Strategy & Commercial Capability: Demonstrated experience developing product strategies, identifying market opportunities, defining product-market fit, and driving commercial growth. Customer Discovery & Market Validation: Strong capability engaging with customers, understanding operational challenges, validating requirements, and translating insights into product direction. Complex Technology Experience: Experience working with sophisticated technology products, ideally within defence, aerospace, autonomous systems, robotics, AI, or another technically complex environment. Technical Fluency: Strong enough technical understanding to collaborate effectively with engineering teams and understand system-level considerations, without being focused primarily on technical delivery. Roadmap & Prioritisation Expertise: Proven ability to create outcome-based roadmaps, balance competing priorities, and align stakeholders around product objectives. Market & Competitive Analysis: Ability to understand industry trends, competitor landscapes, and emerging applications to inform strategic decisions. Customer-Facing Capability: Comfortable engaging directly with customers, partners, and technical stakeholders, including international travel (approximately 25%) to support global markets including the US and Poland. Cross-Functional Leadership: Exceptional communication skills with the ability to align engineering, sales, marketing, and executive stakeholders around a shared product vision. Comfort with Ambiguity: Ability to operate effectively in a high-growth environment where products, markets, and customer needs are continuously evolving. Security Clearance: Must hold, or be capable of obtaining, an Australian Baseline/NV1 security clearance (or equivalent international partner clearance). What we offer You will work on the hardest problems in deep-tech — optics, autonomy, real-time AI and hardware-software integration in a single product. The gap between what you build and where it ends up is almost nonexistent. You will collaborate with exceptional leaders who have decades of combined experience in AI, optics and defense. You will be learning from — and contributing to — the best in the field. You will become part of a close-knit, ego-free team where ideas compete on merit, not seniority. Low politics, high trust. The kind of team you will still be talking about in ten years. You will work hard and be expected to bring your best — and in return you will grow faster than you ever would at a large organization. You will work on technology that is already deployed in real environments — protecting lives and strengthening security across defense and national security applications. You will receive a competitive, market-benchmarked salary, structured career pathways built to grow with you, and the opportunity to participate in our Employee Share Option Plan (ESOP). You will have the opportunity to mentor bright emerging talent through our highly sought-after intern program and strong connections with leading universities. If this sounds like you, please apply even if you don't check every box listed above and join our growing team in improving security and saving lives! Who We Are Arkeus builds AI-powered sensing systems that help autonomous platforms detect, track and understand what's happening in the most complex and contested environments. Our technology is deployed across defence and national security applications — already protecting lives and strengthening security across the U.S. and allied markets. Backed by QIC, Main Sequence, R+VC, Salus Ventures, Folklore Ventures, DYNE Ventures and Beaten Zone Venture Partners, Arkeus is entering a major growth phase. We are a small, fast-moving company with the energy and ambition of a start-up and the technical credibility of a world-class defence technology provider. We work at the intersection of optics, autonomy, robotics and real-time AI and we deploy what we build. If you want to ship technology that matters, not technology that ships decks, this is where you belong. Check it yourself on News | Arkeus We have developed an inclusive, transparent and engaging culture that focuses on building a diverse workforce — realising that to attract the very best, we need to ensure our culture is ready to welcome people from all ages, genders and backgrounds.