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. Reporting to the SVP of Product, this role sets portfolio-level direction, aligns decisions across teams, and is accountable for business outcomes including platform adoption and the cost and time required to stand up deployments. The Director works with product managers and leaders across the company to determine what to build and to grow the team that delivers it. The role shapes the platform’s data foundation, interfaces, cross-organization collaboration, and reusable capabilities. It also guides how existing prototypes become durable, configurable products that can be reused across the portfolio, making each deployment faster and less costly. The Director establishes patterns for human–AI collaboration and decides where deterministic workflows or agentic systems are appropriate. The Director partners with Engineering, AI, Data, mission solution, and go-to-market teams to align product strategy with architecture and field needs. The position is full-time and may be based from an office in Arlington, Virginia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; San Francisco, California; or anywhere in the United States. The role 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.
Portfolio-level thinking, including making trade-offs across teams and reframing problems to make the overall business more coherent.
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 the 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 used by other product teams.
Current U.S. security clearance or ability to obtain one with company sponsorship.
Experience designing products for defense, government, or the public sector.

Responsibilities

Define a platform strategy connected to customer readiness and Air’s ability to win and retain accounts.
Make portfolio-level trade-offs to keep the platform coherent and determine which capabilities should be built once and shared.
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 turn the Readiness Graph into useful understanding for users.
Set direction for cross-organization collaboration and reach across accreditation boundaries.
Own the reuse and scale capabilities that make each deployment faster and less costly than the previous one.
Integrate existing prototypes into durable, configurable capabilities for the full portfolio.
Set patterns for human–AI collaboration, including autonomous actions, recommendations, approvals, and user trust.
Determine where deterministic workflows are appropriate and where agentic systems provide value.
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 support team members’ growth.
Create clarity and principles that enable the team to make effective decisions independently.