Sr. Product Manager

Istari Digital

$145K — $190K *
US-AnywhereRemote in United States
Aerospace & Defense
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 4+ years of product management experience in a fast-paced, innovative environment
  • Proven experience delivering complex features from concept to launch
  • Comfort in technical discussions, particularly with engineers
  • Strong customer research skills, prioritizing user interaction over ticket analysis
  • Direct communication style, able to provide clear, actionable insights
  • Ability to take ownership of product outcomes and work efficiently

Responsibilities

  • Own a product area, managing the roadmap and defining success metrics
  • Create coherence among various features to deliver a unified product narrative
  • Conduct thorough customer research to inform product decisions
  • Collaborate closely with a senior engineering team to streamline workflows
  • Partner with leadership to shape product strategy based on evidence and user feedback
  • Communicate effectively with senior stakeholders to represent product areas

Benefits

  • Comprehensive benefits package including bonuses and equity
  • Direct access to customers for meaningful impact on product direction
  • Work in a technically rich environment, enhancing professional development
  • Collaborative culture with a strong engineering team
  • Ownership of significant product areas, providing a sense of accomplishment
Full Job Description
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 Responibilities

  • 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.


Rerquirements 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.


$145,000 - $190,000 a year

The anticipated compensation range for this position may vary based on experience, skills, qualifications, location, and business needs. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for bonuses, equity, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at Istari Digital

More Aerospace & Defense Jobs

Find similar Sr. Product Manager jobs: