Director of Product, Core

Air•Arlington, VA

About The Position

The Director of Product for the Core Platform owns product strategy for the capabilities that underpin Air’s solutions. The role sets portfolio-level direction so decisions across teams create a coherent platform, and is accountable for outcomes including adoption across the portfolio and the cost and time required to launch deployments. The Director reports to the SVP of Product and helps determine what to build while recruiting, developing, and leading product managers. The role defines platform strategy in support of customer readiness and Air’s business, makes portfolio-level trade-offs, and establishes principles for platform decisions. It shapes the data foundation, interfaces, cross-organization collaboration, and reusable capabilities that allow deployments to become faster and less expensive. It also sets patterns for human–AI collaboration and determines where deterministic workflows or agentic systems are appropriate. The Director partners with Engineering, AI, and Data leadership on platform architecture and with mission solution and go-to-market teams to translate field needs into platform investments. The position is full-time and may be based in Arlington, Virginia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; San Francisco, California; or anywhere in the United States. It may require up to 30% travel. U.S. citizenship is required.

Requirements

U.S. citizenship.
Track record of owning a product line or platform end to end, from strategy through delivery, and delivering business outcomes such as adoption, revenue, or cost-to-serve improvements.
Portfolio-level thinking, including making trade-offs across teams and reframing problems to improve coherence across a business.
Fluency in platform and backend systems concepts, including authorization models such as ABAC, data schemas, service contracts, and distributed-system trade-offs, sufficient to shape architecture decisions with engineering.
Hands-on fluency with AI products, including trade-offs between deterministic and agentic systems and how they fail.
Experience leading and growing product managers.
Experience in enterprise software, such as B2B SaaS, ERPs, or highly configurable specialized-industry platforms.

Nice To Haves

Experience building platform or infrastructure products consumed by other product teams.
Current U.S. security clearance, or ability to obtain one with company sponsorship.
Experience designing for defense, government, or the public sector.

Responsibilities

Define platform strategy that connects customer readiness with how Air wins and retains accounts.
Make portfolio-level trade-offs to maintain a coherent platform and enable shared capabilities across mission teams.
Reframe problems and establish principles that guide platform decisions across teams.
Own and report measurable outcomes, including platform adoption and the cost and time required to stand up each deployment.
Shape the data foundation and interfaces that make the Readiness Graph useful to customers.
Set direction for cross-organization collaboration and reach across accreditation boundaries.
Own the reuse and scale engine that makes deployments faster and less costly over time.
Integrate existing prototypes into durable, configurable capabilities for the full portfolio.
Set human–AI collaboration patterns, including what the system automates, recommends, or requires a person to approve.
Determine where deterministic workflows or agentic systems are appropriate.
Partner with Engineering, AI, and Data leadership on authorization models, data schemas, service contracts, and distributed-system trade-offs.
Partner with mission solution teams and go-to-market to translate field needs into platform investments.
Recruit and develop product managers, raise product quality, and create principles that support sound independent decisions.