Lead Software Product Manager - AI

Candescent; Bengaluru Urban; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 6,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Candescent is seeking a Lead Product Manager to own the product strategy, vision, and roadmap for AI‑driven fintech solutions. You will align cross‑functional teams across engineering, marketing, and sales to deliver differentiated customer experiences and measurable business outcomes.

The role requires deep market and customer understanding, strong leadership, and the ability to drive multi‑tenant SaaS products from concept to launch.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software solutions/product management experience in fintech/banking preferred.
• Bachelor’s degree required; master’s degree preferred.
• High energy, strong organizational and multi‑tasking skills.
• Experience defining large‑scale multi‑tenant architectures and SaaS cloud environments.
• Experience defining roadmaps from customer needs, market analysis, and trends.
• Strong presentation and negotiation skills with senior management and partners.
• Curiosity and motivation to stay current on tech trends and cost drivers.

Responsibilities

• Own product strategy, vision, and roadmap across agile teams and dependencies.
• Drive go‑to‑market planning, pricing, and profitability of product portfolio.
• Lead cross‑functional collaboration with marketing, sales, and engineering.
• Partner with Product Owners to guide development and speed‑to‑market.
• Identify gaps and new opportunities to deliver business outcomes.
• Align objectives with broader business goals and measures.

Job description

Candescent is a forward-thinking technology company transforming how financial institutions deliver Intelligent Banking experiences. We unite digital banking, account opening, and branch solutions that power and connect digital banking, account opening, and branch solutions—creating seamless engagement across digital, remote, and in-person channels.

Our Experience‑Led, Intelligence‑Driven approach combines human‑centered design with data, automation, and cloud‑based innovation. Built on an API‑first architecture, our extensible ecosystem enables institutions to adapt quickly, integrate easily, and unlock new opportunities for growth—turning every customer interaction into a moment of clarity, confidence, and connection.

Lead Product Manager

Position Summary

We are seeking talented Product Managers to create exceptional customer experiences. The ideal candidate will be user‑obsessed, driving the overall product’s strategy, vision, and roadmap to enhance the customer experience and achieve key product objectives. Product Managers are responsible for ensuring alignment across agile teams and managing dependencies. They must possess visionary thinking, strategic planning skills, and the leadership ability to develop and guide Product Owners. A deep understanding of market trends, customer needs, and the competitive landscape is crucial for driving product differentiation. They must also effectively align product objectives with broader business goals.

Product Mission

Our mission is to enable effective use of AI by providing high‑quality, well‑structured data as its foundation. By integrating data seamlessly into AI workflows, we help institutions unlock intelligent automation, predictive insights, and smarter customer experiences across the enterprise.

Product Vision

Our vision is to lead the industry in applying Agentic AI and emerging technologies to augment workforces, deliver personalized experiences, and drive intelligent decision‑making. We design these AI solutions for real‑world impact – predicting outcomes, recommending actions, and enabling monetization opportunities for our customers.

Key Areas of Responsibility

Product P&L and Pricing

• Drives product profitability and performance with product leadership, managing short and long‑term outcomes of product portfolio including connection to roadmap, objectives, and investments

Product Strategy, Vision, and Planning

• Leverages market research, customer / user needs, and internal business priorities to create the product vision (e.g., target customers, markets, channels, value proposition)
• Aligns the product vision with cross‑functional stakeholders to shape the product roadmap, investment areas, and outcome measures
• Conducts PI planning with Product and Team resources to prioritize the product roadmap
• Identify new solutions, enhancement opportunities, or product gaps that exist in our current solution portfolio and make the case for investment and prioritize resources to deliver on our business outcomes

Customer Experience Research, Insights, And Execution

• Demonstrates deep understanding of the customer / user through research and insights development (e.g., personas, journeys, product chartering)
• Utilizes research and insights from the customer / user, competitive landscape, and market environment to determine the product‑market fit

Product Design and Development

• Prioritizes the product roadmap across product teams to maximize business value across development of new products, reimagining existing products, and maintenance
• Partners with the Product Owners to oversee product development and actively engages cross‑functional stakeholders to enable faster speed to market

Go‑to‑Market and Sales

• Engages with enabling functions (e.g., marketing, sales, operations, etc.) to position and promote products to achieve business objectives

Channel Alignment / Management

• Gathers competitive, customer, market, and internal business priorities to prioritize digital solutions (epics / features) that drive customer interactions
• Manages product capabilities across channels to deliver product objectives
• Leverages shared channel platforms to improve product speed to market and drive cost efficiencies for both development and ongoing support costs

Adoption

• Drives product demand, activation, and engagement based on customer experience research and insights and delivering product solutions that customers / users need

Marketing and Analytics

• Supports marketing to define and execute the product’s marketing strategy, budget, and key performance indicators to drive growth

Performance Measurement and Optimization

• Develops, analyzes, monitors, and reports on performance metrics at the product level to identify key trends and opportunities; uses insights to drive progress on identified strategies

Qualifications

• 10+ years of related experience in software solutions/product management for fintech or banking industry experience preferred
• Bachelor’s Degree required, preferably in information technology management, computer science, business, software engineering or equivalent experience; master’s degree preferred
• High energy level, strong organizational and multi‑tasking skills to balance short, medium, and long‑term objectives
• Experience defining large‑scale solutions architected for multi‑tenant infrastructure and platform‑as‑a‑service cloud computing environments
• Experience defining product roadmaps based on abstract and detailed customer requirements, use cases, market analysis, and industry trends
• Passion for and commitment to delivering effective solutions that improve services to customers
• Strong and confident presentation and negotiation skills to interact with senior management, key customers, and partners in sales and issue resolution
• Natural curiosity and self‑motivation to stay current on technical trends and cost drivers that impact user experience and product performance

Product Specific Qualifications / Skillsets

• Proven track record of leading AI products from inception to launch
• Strong experience developing AI product strategy, product requirements, use cases, cost and benefit analysis, and competitive analysis
• Hands‑on experience of AI technologies, such as LLMs, prompt engineering, multi‑modal models, model training, fine‑tuning, reinforcement learning, chain of thought, and reasoning
• Experience developing applications with modern agentic AI platforms (e.g. Google ADK, Microsoft Azure AI, or AWS agent core and bedrock) on clouds (e.g. GCP, AWS, or Azure)
• Deep understanding of AI limitations (e.g. model hallucination and model performance), and the corresponding AI product strategy for evaluation, testing and guardrails
• Strong knowledge and understanding of responsible AI governance standards and processes
• Ability to have in‑depth technical discussions with engineering teams on end‑to‑end data flow, system design, solution, scalability, performance, reliability, and security
• Experience in the fintech, banking, payments, or financial services area is a big plus