Product Lead

Crane Venture Partners; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

London office

25 days annual leave

Learning budget

Travel for client visits

Team offsites

Job summary

Encord is hiring a Product Lead to own a meaningful slice of the platform, spanning core experience, data curation, and exploration layers. You will drive strategy through to outcomes and scale ateam of Product Managers, collaborating with Engineering, ML, Design, and Customer Success.

You will shape the data layer for AI, solve complex problems without a playbook, and own the product direction in a high-autonomy role at Encord.

Qualifications

• Proven product leadership in scaling startups.
• Experience mentoring other product managers.
• Experience with B2B SaaS sold to enterprises.
• Track record tying product decisions to business outcomes.
• Self-starter who makes independent decisions and drives them through.

Responsibilities

• Own and manage the product roadmap across your areas, ensuring alignment with company goals, KPIs, and enterprise customer needs.
• Manage, coach, and develop Product Managers: setting clear goals, giving regular feedback, reviewing their specs and decisions, and accelerating their growth.
• Set the standard for product craft across the team: discovery, prioritisation, spec quality, and shipping cadence.
• Lead customer discovery, interviews, problem validation, webinars, and demos, translating complex pain points into clear, winning product bets.
• Partner with Sales and Customer Success to drive upsell, cross-sell, and expansion within our largest enterprise accounts.
• Collaborate with Engineering and Design to ship high-quality features at pace, writing tight specs, making clear tradeoffs, and holding a high bar for what ships.
• Play a leading role in building a high-performing, collaborative product management culture as the team grows.

Skills

Product management

Leadership

Mentoring

B2B SaaS

Metrics & impact

Customer discovery

Ownership

Customer storytelling

Job description

About us

Encord is the universal data layer for AI that helps 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. Our platform indexes, curates, annotates, and evaluates data across the full AI lifecycle, from development through production.

Trusted by Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, Zipline, and more. We're an ambitious team of 100+ working at the frontier of AI and have raised $60M in Series C funding from Wellington Management, CRV, Next47 and Y Combinator.

The role

Encord is a fast-growing company building the data infrastructure layer for AI teams. We work with leading enterprises across autonomous vehicles, healthcare, robotics, and generative AI. Our product team is small, high-calibre, and operating in green-field territory. The data layer for AI is still being defined, and you will help define it.

As Product Lead, you will own a meaningful slice of the product, spanning the core platform experience, data curation and exploration layer, and drive it from strategy through to customer outcomes. You will lead and grow a team of Product Managers, setting direction, raising the bar on craft, and multiplying your impact through them. You will work closely with Engineering, ML, Design, and Customer Success, and play an active role in Encord's enterprise go-to-market motion.

This is a high-autonomy role for someone who is comfortable making independent decisions and driving them through, and who can build a team that does the same.

The Opportunity:

Just as LLMs were unlocked by massive text datasets, the next wave of breakthroughs in self-driving vehicles, robotics, drones and generative AI requires building entirely new datasets and human feedback pipelines that don't yet exist. Encord is the platform the world's most ambitious AI teams use to build them, and you'll be helping define what that platform looks like.

Hard and Complex Problems:

There is no playbook for what the data layer for AI looks like. You'll be solving novel problems across your product areas: from core platform (tooling that scales from a 10-person startup to a 500-person AV team) to data curation (helping customers turn floods of raw data into high-signal training datasets).

Ownership and Growth:

Product is represented at the highest levels at Encord. You'll have real ownership: setting strategy, making calls, driving them through, and building the team that executes. As one of the most senior product people in the company, your impact is visible and your trajectory is accelerated.

What you'll do

• Own and manage the product roadmap across your areas, ensuring alignment with company goals, KPIs, and enterprise customer needs
• Manage, coach, and develop Product Managers: setting clear goals, giving regular feedback, reviewing their specs and decisions, and accelerating their growth.
• Set the standard for product craft across the team: discovery, prioritisation, spec quality, and shipping cadence
• Lead customer discovery, interviews, problem validation, webinars, and demos, translating complex pain points into clear, winning product bets
• Partner with Sales and Customer Success to drive upsell, cross-sell, and expansion within our largest enterprise accounts
• Collaborate with Engineering and Design to ship high-quality features at pace, writing tight specs, making clear tradeoffs, and holding a high bar for what ships
• Play a leading role in building a high-performing, collaborative product management culture as the team grows

Experience requirements

• Experience in product, ideally including time at a rapidly scaling startup. You have seen an organisation scale and know what good product looks like at each stage
• Experience managing or formally mentoring other product managers, or a clear track record of leading through others and a strong desire to step into people management
• Proven experience on B2B SaaS products or technical products sold to enterprise customers. You understand the enterprise sales motion, expansion, and how product decisions connect to revenue
• You speak in metrics and impact, not features shipped. You have worked closely with GTM teams and can tie product decisions to business outcomes
• A self-starter who makes independent decisions and drives them through. You want ownership, not just input. You are energised by ambiguity, not paralysed by it
• You love speaking to customers. You are curious about hard problems at the frontier of AI, and you anticipate needs before customers can fully articulate them
• Excellent communication skills for leading internal sessions and external engagements, customer interviews, demos, and stakeholder presentations

Encord encourages people from all backgrounds, cultures, and skill levels to apply. You don't need to meet every requirement. We are looking for people who are passionate, customer-focused, and eager to learn.

Why Encord

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup
• Strong in-person culture - most of the team works from our London office 4+ days/week
• 25 days annual leave + UK public holidays
• Annual learning & development budget
• Travel for customer visits, events, and conferences across the UK and Europe
• Company lunches twice a week
• Monthly socials & bi-annual team offsites