Senior Product Manager, AI Platform

QAD Inc.; Pune District; On-site; INR 1,800,000 - 3,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthy work-life balance

Growth and opportunity

Collaborative culture

Job summary

QAD Inc. is seeking a Product Manager in Pune to lead the full product lifecycle for AI-powered Copilot and Conversational Analytics. You will define product vision, partner across teams, and drive customer adoption. The ideal candidate has 7-12 years in product management, particularly in AI and analytics in B2B environments. This role offers a chance to make impactful decisions and shape the future of QAD's offerings in a collaborative culture. Join us in expanding our platform capabilities in India!

Qualifications

• 7–12 years in product management, especially for AI-powered and analytics products.
• Experience in matrix organizations, driving outcomes across teams.
• Proven track record of owning the full product lifecycle.

Responsibilities

• Define the product vision and drive the development process.
• Own the Copilot and Search product definitions.
• Develop and maintain customer discovery programs.

Skills

Product management

AI-powered products

Semantic search

Conversational analytics

Stakeholder communication

Job description

Job Description

Role Overview

This role owns the full product lifecycle for QAD's Copilot, Search, and Conversational Analytics capabilities — from architecture through to market launch. You will define what gets built, why it matters to manufacturing users, and how it reaches them: shaping the product vision, driving engineering delivery, and partnering with GTM to ensure adoption.

The Opportunity

Manufacturing users today cannot query their own operations without analysts, BI tools, or pre-built reports. QAD's AI platform changes this — but only if the Copilot and Search layer is built correctly and lands with users. You will own both sides of that equation.

Define the semantic search and conversational analytics product that allows manufacturing users to query operational data — orders, inventory, suppliers, quality records — in natural language, without SQL or BI expertise.

Own the intelligence contract: how queries are understood, how manufacturing context is assembled, how retrieval is orchestrated, and how responses are grounded in governed data — the foundational decisions that determine product quality at scale.

Drive the Copilot from concept to customer — including the contextual layer architecture, the grounding contract against the platform's Semantic Layer, and the GTM motion that gets it adopted in manufacturing workflows.

Build the feedback loops that make the product smarter over time: how recurring query patterns surface ontology gaps, how session analytics drive prioritisation, and how discovery findings translate into product improvements.

Establish QAD's conversational analytics presence in market — working with GTM to define positioning, enablement, and the narrative that differentiates QAD's intelligence layer from horizontal AI tools.

Key Responsibilities

Copilot & Conversational Analytics: Own the product definition for QAD's Copilot: how queries are understood, context assembled, data retrieved, and responses generated — specifying the contracts that engineering builds against. Define the grounding contract: the rules that ensure every Copilot response cites governed manufacturing data, not hallucinated inference — including confidence signalling and graceful fallback behaviour. Drive the conversational analytics strategy: how natural language queries translate into analytical results across manufacturing data domains without exposing SQL or BI complexity to the user. Specify the disambiguation model: how the Copilot handles ambiguous queries, missing context, and conflicting data signals in real manufacturing workflows.

Search: Own the product definition for QAD's semantic search layer: indexing strategy, query understanding, entity recognition, ranking, and result structure across manufacturing data domains. Define the search intent taxonomy — operational (find order, trace shipment), analytical (show trends, compare periods), diagnostic (why is this delayed, what caused this variance) — and specify result formats by intent type. Drive the federated search architecture: how results from ERP operational data, analytical stores, and the knowledge graph are ranked and merged into a coherent, useful response.

Discovery, Delivery & GTM: Maintain a structured customer discovery programme — extracting real manufacturing query patterns and translating findings into specific product and architecture implications. Own the product backlog: writing stories to Staff Engineer level of specificity — API contracts, state machines, data flows, edge cases — that engineering can build without verbal clarification. Partner with GTM to define the launch and adoption strategy for Copilot and Search: positioning, sales enablement, onboarding playbooks, and the narrative that lands with manufacturing buyers. Define the quality framework for these surfaces: what signals matter for product performance — retrieval relevance, grounding rate, latency distribution — and how they inform roadmap decisions.

Stakeholder Management & Managing Up: Proactively surface dependencies, risks, and scope changes to the Director and Head of Platform Product — with a resolution proposal, not just an escalation. Communicate product and architecture decisions clearly to non-technical stakeholders — translating trade‑offs into business implications without jargon. Build credibility with Engineering, Architecture, and GTM through the quality and precision of written work.

Qualifications

What You'll Bring

Product Experience

7–12 years in product management, with significant time owning AI‑powered, search, or analytics products in enterprise B2B environments — from definition through production launch.

Proven track record owning the full product lifecycle: customer discovery, specification, engineering delivery, and GTM — not just one slice.

Experience working in matrixed organisations — driving outcomes across Platform, Engineering, Architecture, and GTM without direct authority.

Evidence of structured discovery practice applied to a technical product surface — ability to extract product implications from user research, not just UX insights.

Core Technical Depth — Required

Semantic search architecture: indexing strategy, query understanding, entity recognition, ranking models, and relevance evaluation at enterprise scale.

Conversational AI product design: how natural language queries are translated into structured analytical results across complex, domain‑specific data without exposing backend complexity to users.

LLM‑integrated product specification: grounding strategies, hallucination mitigation, response quality gates, and context window management — sufficient to define product contracts engineering builds against.

Data platform fluency: OLAP vs operational DB reads, federated search across heterogeneous stores, and how data freshness constraints affect product quality — sufficient to hold authoritative conversations with data engineers.

SQL and data modelling: sufficient to validate query plans, understand schema implications, and reason through retrieval architecture trade‑offs.

Working Familiarity — Expected to Grow Into

Intent detection and query understanding pipelines: how user inputs are parsed, classified, and routed across platform layers.

Context assembly and packaging: how metric definitions, entity relationships, and business rules are structured and passed downstream at inference time.

Session and state management: conversation continuity, context windowing across multi‑turn interactions, and memory summarisation patterns.

Human‑in‑the‑loop design: approval workflows, confidence thresholds, and escalation paths where AI‑generated outputs require human validation before action.

Additional competencies

This role is calibrated to a Staff PM equivalent. Across QAD's four PM competency pillars:

• Product Execution — Expert: Feature specification to Staff Engineer fidelity, end‑to‑end delivery ownership, and AI‑specific quality gates (grounding rate, retrieval relevance, latency SLAs).
• Customer Insight — Expert: Translates discovery and usage data into product decisions. Understands that conversational UX quality is determined by the intelligence layer beneath it.
• Product Strategy — Expert on vision and road‑mapping; Intermediate on strategic impact, with a clear growth path toward Advanced as the platform scales.
• Influencing People — Intermediate on stakeholder management and managing up, growing toward Advanced. No people management expectation; growth path is toward leading a TPO as the surface scales.
• Writing and communication — Produces a concrete proposal or spec draft before escalating ambiguity.
• Clear distinction of known/assumed/validated and acting accordingly.
• Comfortable operating without a playbook — defines the approach in novel problem spaces.
• Gravitate toward precision in language and specification — understands that ambiguous requirements are a form of technical debt.

Manufacturing or ERP Context — Preferred

Familiarity with manufacturing ERP data models (inventory, orders, procurement, quality) is a strong plus; not required if technical depth and learning velocity are demonstrated.

Experience with operational analytics or supply chain intelligence products is valued, especially where the product involved translating domain‑specific data into natural language interfaces.

Additional Information

• Your health and well being are important to us at QAD. We provide programs that help you strike a healthy work‑life balance.
• Opportunity to join a growing business, launching into its next phase of expansion and transformation.
• Collaborative culture of smart and hard‑working people who support one another to get the job done.
• An atmosphere of growth and opportunity, where idea‑sharing is always prioritized over level or hierarchy.
• Compensation packages based on experience and desired skill set.

Why This Role at QAD

End‑to‑end ownership: You define what gets built and ensure it lands — from intelligence layer architecture to GTM motion and customer adoption.

High‑leverage surface: Copilot and Search are the primary interface through which manufacturing users experience QAD's AI platform. The decisions you make here compound across the platform.

Technical depth valued: Specification quality is the primary currency of influence in this environment. Strong product thinking is recognised and rewarded.

Growth trajectory: Clear path from Staff PM to broader intelligence surface ownership — including deeper agentic platform exposure — and over time, a small team.

Pune platform hub: QAD is actively expanding its platform engineering and product capabilities in India — you will be a founding voice in that growth.

QAD is committed to ensuring that every employee feels they work in an environment that values their contributions, respects their unique perspectives and provides opportunities for growth regardless of background. QAD’s DEI program is driving higher levels of diversity, equity and inclusion so that employees can bring their whole self to work.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.