Sr. Product Manager

Job description

Istari Digital builds the connective tissue for defense acquisition. Our platform lets engineering models, simulations, and digital threads move securely across primes, suppliers, and government program offices, so a system can be tested, trusted, and fielded in months rather than years. We work at the center of some of the hardest problems in defense acquisition: getting the right model, to the right person, at the right classification, at the right time. We are a small, senior team, and every hire changes what the company can do next. ### The role 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. This is a role for someone ambitious who wants real ownership. 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. 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. ### Core Responsibilities - 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. ### Requirements and Who Thrives in This Role 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. ### Preferred, not required - Experience as the PM for a CLI-based tool, SDK, or other developer-facing product. - Experience as the PM for a desktop or client application — client software is weird in ways that web/SaaS experience doesn’t cover, and we’d benefit from someone who has spent time in those trenches. - Deep technical experience with cloud or security infrastructure, especially on products sold to engineers (B2B tooling for data processing, cloud services, and the like). - Background in aerospace, defense, digital engineering, or other regulated domains. - Must be a US citizen living within the United States. ### Why Istari Digital 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. --- We’ve built a team of what we call Wizards — people who bring depth in their domain and range across others, who are collaborative without being deferential, and who genuinely care about what we’re building. We celebrate individual contributions, give feedback early and often, and argue about ideas so we can execute together. There’s no room here for hierarchy for its own sake, or for busywork that doesn’t move the mission. We are outcomes-driven, and we hold each other to a high standard — with genuine respect for each person’s expertise and wellbeing. Focus is rewarded. Finish is remembered. Facts are friendly. Even when they are not fun. Fellowship is fundamental. Make others successful.