Product Manager - Core Application

Description

About Windward

Windward is the leading Maritime AI™ company, fusing large scale multi-source data and GenAI to empower global leaders with mission-grade intelligence. We help organizations anticipate threats and make high-stakes decisions with confidence.

Product at Windward

We hire product managers that lean in and can own a domain. You get a problem space and a team, and you're expected to have a point of view, make the calls that are yours to make, and bring a recommendation on the ones that aren't.

Product at Windward runs two kinds of work. Customer-facing - the app, agentic investigations, mission workflows - where you're close to analysts, investigators and government operators. Data and research - pipelines, extracting intelligence from raw sources, running model research - where the craft is in the accuracy and coverage of what comes out.

We hire people who can do both. Most PMs here move between them, and the strongest ones ask to. We're not looking for someone with the exact right resume. We're looking for horsepower, judgment, and the ability to make complicated things simple.

How We Work

We move fast, ship continuously, and care more about outcomes than titles or hand-waving. If you have a bias for action, enjoy being hands-on, and naturally prioritize value, this is the team for you.

About the Role

We're rebuilding the Windward application from the ground up, and you’ll co-own it. It's two products at once: the workspace analysts and government operators actually work in, and the composition layer underneath it - an app builder for missions. You'll build the data and UX primitives that other PMs assemble into a customer-tailored mission workflow. The problem to solve is a modular investigations system: sharp enough to compose into different missions, and open enough that agentic workflows run inside them rather than beside them.

What You'll Do

• Own the layer everyone else builds on. The application itself. The rest of the product org, sales engineering, and every mission we sell run on the primitives you define.
• Work on things that matter. Interdiction, mission planning, investigations - our product sits inside decisions with real global consequences.
• Lead your own team of engineers. A dedicated team building with you. You're not their manager, but you set what gets built and why, and you're in the architecture conversation rather than briefed after it.
• Challenge, get challenged. We move between different kinds of hard, but we do it together. New research areas, novel world problems, new types of intelligence sources.
• Present your own work. Small product org, no layers. You're in front of the exec team, sales team, and marketing team.
• Build your own agents and skills. You’ll spend time abstracting your job and putting yourself in a position where your role is about judgment, not busiwork.
• Join a team that's pretty fun, kinda smart, and a little stupid. We love working together, care about good work and good vibes in equal measure, are genuinely obsessed with solving hard problems, and want you to succeed here.

Requirements

Who You Are

• 2-10 years in product. We care about trajectory more than years - we've hired PMs early in their careers and PMs with more than a decade behind them, and we set title and comp to the person, not the req.
• Fast on complex things. You pick up an unfamiliar, technical, high-stakes domain quickly and get to real understanding, not vocabulary. This is the single thing we screen hardest for.
• A clarifier. You make complicated things simple - in a decision, a requirement, a slide, a Slack message. You naturally produce focused written outputs that tell a story, rather than pages-long docs of AI slop.
• High agency. You see something broken and fix it without being asked. You start things. You don't wait for permission, cover, or a perfectly defined scope. Founders and 0-to-1 builders tend to do well here.
• Someone people are calm handing work to. Organized, dependable, follows through, doesn't drop things. Nobody needs to check your work or chase you for it.
• You think in systems, and you’re technical. You've designed something modular before and know the failure modes. Whether or not you've been an engineer, you're comfortable with system design, data, APIs and models, and you can hold your own in an engineering conversation.
• Great taste, and you own the quality. Real instincts about what makes a product feel good to use. You obsess over details, from the UX to the logic, with customer empathy.
• AI-native. You use AI daily and well, you follow where it's going, and you have opinions about it.
• A strong presenter and writer, in English, to any audience - engineers, executives, customers, governments.

Advantage

• You've founded a company, or were among the first employees at one.
• Background as an engineer, designer, or data scientist.
• Experience with intelligence, defense, maritime, trade, or compliance.