Staff Product Manager (Runtime Team)

Georgian; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Participation in the company’s share/​

Flexible working from home policy

Work from outside of the UK for up to

Private healthcare

Job summary

PolyAI in London is seeking a highly technical senior product leader to own the platform underpinning our conversations: the runtime that serves conversations in production, the inference layer powering our models, and the data infrastructure that feeds both. This is an infrastructure-focused role with direct exposure to latency, cost, and reliability tradeoffs at scale.

You’ll set strategy for areas other teams build on top of, working closely with engineering leadership rather than through

Qualifications

• 6+ years of product management or related technical experience owning infrastructure, ML/data platform, or runtime-adjacent products.
• Bachelor’s degree (or foreign equivalent) in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or a related field involving AI/ML or distributed systems, or equivalent industry experience.
• Strong working knowledge of how inference and model-serving infrastructure actually works: latency budgets, GPU/node economics, self-hosted vs. managed serving tradeoffs.
• Comfortable owning a roadmap with no end-user-visible surface, and able to make the business case for infrastructure investment on its own terms.
• Experience with data platform decisions: pipelines, residency/compliance constraints, and tradeoffs between centralizing vs. fragmenting data by region or product line.
• Demonstrated ability to operate at a senior level: setting direction, not just executing against someone else’s plan, and mentoring more junior PMs.

Responsibilities

• Own the product strategy for runtime, inference, and the data platform.
• Set direction on build-vs-buy and self-host-vs-managed tradeoffs for model serving.
• Build and own the evaluation framework for runtime and inference performance in production.
• Partner with infrastructure and platform engineering leadership to sequence a technical roadmap.
• Own how conversation data flows into and out of the platform, including data residency and access-control tradeoffs.
• Translate ambiguous technical constraints into decisions the business can plan around.
• Lead and influence a cross-functional group of engineers, data scientists, and infrastructure specialists.
• Represent this area in exec-level conversations on cost, capacity planning, and platform risk.

Skills

Infra product ownership

ML/data platform

Runtime/production systems

Cross-functional leadership

Strategic thinking

Executive communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering/Statistics or AI/ML

Job description

PolyAI is the Agentic Dialog Platform for building the conversational enterprise, used to build, run, govern, and improve dialog agents at scale. Powered by Raven, a proprietary dialog model trained on more than a billion enterprise conversations, PolyAI agents are built for complexity, open at every layer, and sovereign by design. PolyAI serves hundreds of enterprises across 75 languages and 25 countries, including Metro Bank, Marriott, PG&E, and UniCredit.

PolyAI automates customer service through lifelike voice assistants that let customers lead a conversation. Our voice assistants make it possible for businesses to deliver outstanding customer service that rivals their human agents.

Our customers, which include the world’s leading logos, are expanding how they use our platform, driving automation of critical customer service operations and integrating PolyAI into their daily customer service workflows.

We’re looking for a highly technical, senior product leader to own the platform underneath everything our agents do: the runtime that serves conversations in production, the inference layer that powers our models, and the data infrastructure that feeds both. This is a deep infrastructure role with direct exposure to latency, cost, and reliability tradeoffs at scale, not a roadmap-and-backlog role. You’ll set strategy for areas other teams build on top of, working closely with engineering leadership rather than through them

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own the product strategy for runtime (how conversations get served in production), inference (how our models are hosted and served, including self-hosted and third-party paths), and the data platform (how conversation and model data moves, is stored, and is queried across the business)
• Set direction on build-vs-buy and self-host-vs-managed tradeoffs for model serving, including evaluating cost, latency, and scaling implications of infrastructure decisions before they’re made, not after
• Build and own the evaluation framework for how we measure runtime and inference performance in production (latency, throughput, cost per minute/token, failure rates), and drive continuous improvement off that data
• Partner directly with infrastructure and platform engineering leadership to sequence a technical roadmap that often has no visible customer-facing surface, and defend its priority against features that do
• Own how conversation data flows into and out of the platform, including data residency, retention, and access-control tradeoffs that affect what the business can build or sell
• Translate ambiguous technical constraints (capacity limits, model failure modes, data gaps) into decisions the rest of the business can plan around
• Lead and influence a cross-functional group of engineers, data scientists, and infrastructure specialists without formal authority over them
• Represent this area in exec-level conversations on cost, capacity planning, and platform risk

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 6+ years of product management or related technical experience, including a strong track record owning infrastructure, ML/data platform, or runtime-adjacent products, not just user-facing features
• Bachelor’s degree (or foreign equivalent) in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or a related field involving AI/ML or distributed systems, or equivalent industry experience
• Strong working knowledge of how inference and model-serving infrastructure actually works: latency budgets, GPU/node economics, self-hosted vs. managed serving tradeoffs
• Comfortable owning a roadmap with no end-user-visible surface, and able to make the business case for infrastructure investment on its own terms
• Experience with data platform decisions: pipelines, residency/compliance constraints, and tradeoffs between centralizing vs. fragmenting data by region or product line
• Demonstrated ability to operate at a senior level: setting direction, not just executing against someone else’s plan, and mentoring more junior PMs
• Entrepreneurial mindset, comfortable with ambiguity and fast iteration in a high-growth environment
• Exceptional cross-functional communication skills, particularly translating infrastructure tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders

Compensation

We offer a competitive base salary, shaped by your experience and location, plus equity — so you share in the value you help create.

Benefits

• Participation in the company’s employee share options plan
• Tenure-Based PTO: You will receive 25 holidays when you join and will gain an additional 1 day after 2 years of service, then 1 day each year until capped at 32 holidays
• Flexible working from home policy
• Work from outside of the UK for up to 6 months each year
• TELUS Health EAP 24/7 - offers you and your chosen family confidential, judgment-free support for any work, health, or life challenge
• Enhanced parental leave
• Bike2Work scheme
• Annual learning and development allowance
• We’re all about making WFH work for you - that’s why we offer a one-off WFH allowance when you join. Offering perks like noise-cancelling headphones or a comfortable desk chair to boost your comfort and focus!
• Company-funded fertility and family-forming programmes
• Menopause care programme with Maven
• Private healthcare and dental cover, discounts on gym members and relaxation apps, and access to a range of mental health programs
• Sabbatical Program: 5-week paid sabbatical available after 5 years of employment

At PolyAI, we take great pride in our values - they guide everything we do. We believe that a strong culture leads to meaningful work and lasting impact.

Our core values are:

Only the best

We expect the best from our people, we hire people that expect the best from themselves, and we nurture this drive for excellence.

Ownership

We care deeply about what we do. We take ownership of our initiatives, decisions and outcomes.

Relentlessly improve

We demand more from ourselves and are always evolving. Continuous, obsessive improvement is the only way we will transform the world of conversational AI.

Bias for action

Our world moves quickly and so do we. We take calculated risks and we deliver impact fast.

Disagree and commit

We are all working toward the same goal. If we don’t agree with something, we work hard to understand it and when a decision is made, we accept it and give it our all.

Build for people

We want the world to enjoy the experiences they have with us. We are building for a future that prefers automation.

PolyAI is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All employment decisions at PolyAI will be based on the business needs without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, neurodiversity status or disability status.

Kindly find the Privacy Notice for our recruitment process by following the link here. This document provides important information regarding how we handle your personal data throughout the recruitment journey.