Lightyear is building the operating system for enterprise AI consumption: the layer that measures, governs and optimizes how organizations spend on tokens, models and agents. We are hiring a Director of Product, our founding product lead, to own what we build, in what order, and for whom.
The product is modular- Lightyear's basic offering gives finance and engineering leaders attribution of AI spend by developer, model, team and project, empowering them to optimize usage and spend. Advanced tiers are deployed directly into an enterprise's operations, optimizing model routing and budget in real time.
This is a 0-to-1 role. You will define the MVP, recruit and run design partners, set the methodology for attributing token spend and connecting it to work outcomes, carry the technical half of the sale with FinOps leads, platform and AI engineering teams, finance, and the CTOs and heads of AI who must justify the AI budget, and build the product function from scratch. You should be as comfortable debating gateway architecture and telemetry schemas with engineers as you are sitting across from a CFO explaining the return on their AI spend. You will be the founding product lead and first product hire, with a mandate to hire and lead the product and design team as Lightyear grows.
What you'll doProduct & Platform - Own the product roadmap and the definition of product-market fit, from MVP through the Pro-to-Enterprise ladder, and decide the build sequence across the module set: spend visibility and attribution, token credit request and approval, usage governance and compliance, model optimization, routing and procurement, outcome and productivity measurement, and data and indices
- Define Lightyear Pro: agents and SDKs export their own telemetry, metadata only (no access to underlying prompts or code), minimal admin credentials, customers keep their existing LLM-provider subscriptions, with usage and cost tracked by developer, model, team and project
- Define Lightyear Enterprise with engineering: gateway and console running single-tenant in the customer's cloud, model and budget rules enforced in the request path, and routing of each task to the model with the highest measured return on cost
- Own the outcome and productivity measurement pillar: join token spend to the work it produced (pull requests merged, tickets resolved, features shipped, support cases closed) through integrations with GitHub, Jira, Linear and similar systems, so customers can see marginal productivity per project, per team and per dollar, not only cost
- Own the measurement methodology: how token spend is attributed across providers and plan types (individual, team, API, enterprise), normalized, and connected to the work it produces, so that "spend productivity" is a number FinOps, finance, engineering leaders and auditors trust; measure efficiency (cost per unit of output) rigorously rather than claim revenue attribution
- Own the token expense-management workflow (request, approval, suggested allocation) as the differentiating hook of the Pro product, with the same ambition that Concur brought to T&E and Deel to payroll
- Define how the data and index layer (inference token benchmarks and indices) is produced from product telemetry, and the product logic for what is published free, licensed, and reserved for Hivemind Capital's financial products
- Treat privacy and security posture as product requirements: metadata-only ingestion, data residency, single-tenant deployment, and the path to enterprise compliance (SOC 2, policy enforcement for corporate and regulatory AI usage rules)
Commercial, Design Partners & Go-to-Market - Recruit and run the design-partner program: five to ten organizations already running agents at scale, converting structured conversations with FinOps, platform engineering, finance and engineering leadership (CTO, VP Engineering, Head of AI) into a ranked view of the most acute, monetizable demand and a pilot-to-paid path
- Carry the technical and domain half of the sales conversation across two buyers, the FinOps and platform teams who land the product and the CTO or Head of AI who expands it on outcome measurement: credible demos, integration scoping with platform teams, security and procurement reviews, and the translation of customer needs back into product requirements
- Develop pricing and packaging across the ladder: the free or near-free Pro subscription as a funnel, usage-based Enterprise pricing, and the graduation path between them
- Partner with the sales/BD function and the Hivemind network, opening and running relationships together, with this role owning the technical close
- Serve as "customer zero" by deploying Lightyear on Hivemind Digital Group's own agent spend, and feed what we learn about how enterprises adopt and pay for AI back into the product and the group's investment diligence
- Prepare clear, decision-useful product and commercial reporting for the CEO and group leadership, including PMF signals, design-partner status, pipeline, and go/no-go evidence
Team - Hire and lead the founding product and design team, and establish the product discovery, specification and release process with engineering
Our ideal candidate- 7+ years in product management, with at least one product owned end-to-end from 0 to 1 at a developer-infrastructure, FinOps or spend-management, observability, or fintech company
- Has shipped products that sit in the request path or ingest telemetry: API gateways or proxies, LLM gateways, observability and APM, cloud cost management, or LLM-ops tooling
- Has defined or shipped outcome or productivity metrics for engineering or knowledge work (developer-productivity analytics, AI adoption metrics), or has the rigor to do so with a data lead
- Deep fluency in AI infrastructure economics: provider pricing and plan structures, token metering, model routing, inference costs, and the difference between what individual, team and enterprise plans expose
- Technical enough to be trusted by engineers: reads code, understands SDK and agent instrumentation (OpenTelemetry-style), credential and authentication models, and cloud deployment patterns such as single-tenant and VPC
- Strong commercial instinct, with experience selling to or building for FinOps, platform engineering and finance buyers, and comfort running enterprise security and procurement reviews
- Experience in spend management, expense workflows or FinOps (for example at a corporate-card, cloud cost, or SaaS-management company), or in engineering-intelligence and developer-productivity products, strongly preferred
- Working knowledge of data products, benchmarks or indices, and of how usage data becomes a financial product, is a plus but not required
- Experience running customer research, design-partner programs, and 0-to-1 commercial motions
- Exceptional written and verbal communication, with the ability to make a complex, technical product clear to non-technical buyers
- Founder mentality: intrinsically motivated, comfortable with ambiguity, hands-on with specs and demos, and ambitious to grow into broader product leadership as the team scales
$175,000 - $190,000 a year
CompensationA well-qualified candidate, based in New York City, can expect a base salary of $175,000.00-$190,000.00. A standard offer from Lightyear includes competitive base compensation, generous incentive-based compensation such as discretionary bonuses or stock options, and top-of-market benefits and perks package. As the founding product lead, this role carries a meaningful equity component. Offers are determined by a number of factors including (but not limited to) the applicant's experience, skills, certifications, as well as internal equity among our team.
