Director of Product, Core

Company Description

Job Description

Air's customers run programs where one late part can hold up an entire fleet — and every mission team at Air depends on the same foundation to see it coming: the data, the connections across organizations, and the reusable workflows that turn raw signal into a decision. The Core Platform is that foundation. The challenge is deciding what it must become so that every solution built on it reaches the field faster, costs less to stand up, and compounds in value as more of the mission runs on Air.

As Director of Product for the Core Platform, reporting to the SVP of Product, you own the product strategy for the capabilities the rest of Air is built on. You set portfolio-level direction so that hundreds of decisions across teams add up to one coherent platform, and you are accountable for the business outcomes that follow - adoption across the portfolio and the economics of standing up each new deployment. You'll be in the room when we decide what to build, and you'll build and grow the product managers who deliver it.

This role is a full-time position located out of our office in Arlington, VA / Pittsburgh, PA / San Francisco, CA / Anywhere in the US.

This role may require up to 30% travel.

Scope of Responsibilities

Set platform strategy that drives readiness and the business

• Define a platform strategy that connects directly to how customers reach readiness, and to how Air wins and keeps accounts.
• Make the portfolio-level trade-offs that keep the platform coherent, deciding what to build once and share so mission teams don't rebuild it.
• Reframe the problems worth solving rather than servicing the requests in front of you, and set the principles that guide platform decisions across teams.
• Own measurable outcomes like platform adoption, and the cost and time to stand up each deployment, and report them at the leadership level.

Build the foundation every solution runs on

• Shape the data foundation and the interfaces that turn our Readiness Graph into understanding users could not reach on their own.
• Set the direction for cross-organization collaboration and reach across hard accreditation boundaries.
• Own the reuse and scale engine that makes each new deployment faster and cheaper than the last.
• Rationalize and integrate existing prototypes into durable, configurable capabilities that serve the whole portfolio.

Decide where AI acts, advises, or stays out of the way

• Set the patterns for human–AI collaboration across the platform: what the system does on its own, what it recommends, what a person must approve, and how users know when to trust it.
• Make the call on where deterministic workflows win and where agentic systems earn their place.

Partner across the company

• Work with Engineering, AI, and Data leadership on the platform seams like authorization models, data schemas, service contracts, and distributed-system tradeoffs so product decisions and architecture move together.
• Partner with the mission solution teams and go-to-market to turn field needs into platform bets, and to make the platform the reason Air scales.

Build and grow the team

• • Recruit and develop a team of product managers, raising the bar for product quality and growing each person.
  • Create the clarity and principles that let the team make good decisions without you in the room.

Qualifications

• U.S. Citizenship is required

• A track record of owning a product line or platform end to end - strategy through delivery - and the business outcomes it drove, such as adoption, revenue, or cost-to-serve.
• Portfolio-level thinking at the scale of a business: making trade-offs across teams and reframing problems so the whole is more coherent than the sum of its parts.
• Fluency in platform and backend systems concepts - authorization models (e.g., ABAC), data schemas, service contracts, and distributed-system tradeoffs - enough to shape architecture decisions with engineering.
• Hands-on fluency with AI products, including the tradeoffs between deterministic and agentic systems and how they fail.
• Experience leading and growing product managers.
• Experience in enterprise software (B2B SaaS, ERPs, or highly configurable specialized-industry platforms). We weight the scope you've owned over years in seat; a strong director may have 5–7.

Desired Skills: 

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