Director of Product

BigBear.ai; Columbia (MD); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

BigBear.ai seeks a strategic, hands-on Director of Product to guide product strategy, own the platform roadmap, and lead a cross-functional Product & Engineering team. You will shape the vision, prioritize work, and ensure delivery across backend and frontend domains in a government and regulated market context.

The role partners with a Research & Innovation Lead to translate validated research into the product roadmap, while balancing security, usability, and scalability.

Qualifications

• Six+ years in product management, product ownership, or closely related technology-product leadership.
• Experience directly managing software developers, designers, and product owners as one multidisciplinary team.
• Experience leading a complex enterprise software, SaaS, platform, API, or cloud product.
• Experience delivering product to U.S. government, defense, or national-security customers and/or highly regulated markets.
• Demonstrated success developing product strategy, influencing roadmaps, and translating user needs into executable product work.
• Ability to travel up to 25% and obtain a DoD security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Define and communicate a cohesive product vision and strategy for the Ask Sage platform.
• Guide product discovery, roadmap, and ownership across backend and frontend teams.
• Own end-to-end development process from intake to release, improving predictability and throughput.
• Partner with engineering, UX, design, operations, security, and compliance to turn priorities into plans.
• Maintain a visible, prioritized backlog and ensure alignment with strategy and outcomes.
• Lead hiring and onboarding for anticipated team additions, in partnership with Talent Acquisition.

Skills

Product management

People management

Enterprise software

Defense/national security domain

Roadmapping / strategy

Agile / Scrum

Job description

Residency

All applicants must currently reside in the United States

Overview

Ask Sage(Big Bear company) is seeking a strategic, hands‑on Director of Product to guide product strategy, drive the backend and front‑end development process, and lead a Product & Engineering team in which developers, designers, and product owners are direct reports. Today the team comprises a five‑person backend engineering team and a three‑person front‑end engineering team, alongside design and product ownership, with three to four additional hires anticipated. The Director will work in parallel with a Research & Innovation Lead (to be named). The current backend engineering lead is expected to move into that role as a peer to the Director while retaining some backend development oversight in a senior technical product owner capacity. The two roles work together: the Research & Innovation Lead informs product vision and brings validated research forward, and the Director is accountable for the product, its roadmap, and its delivery.

What you will do

Product vision and strategy

• Develop and communicate a cohesive product vision and strategy for the complete Ask Sage platform.
• Shape product vision together with the Research & Innovation Lead (to be named), incorporating research and innovation direction into strategy and roadmap recommendations.
• Translate customer missions, user needs, company strategy, market dynamics, technical opportunities, security requirements, and business objectives into clear product direction.
• Advise the EVP on roadmap priorities, investments, sequencing, dependencies, and tradeoffs.
• Identify opportunities to build reusable capabilities that serve multiple customer segments, use cases, and deployment environments.
• Guide product lifecycle recommendations involving continued investment, modernization, consolidation, or retirement.

Discovery, roadmap, and product ownership

• Establish repeatable product‑discovery and validation practices that test customer problems, user needs, opportunities, and risks before significant development commitments are made.
• Engage government, national‑security, commercial, and internal stakeholders to understand mission needs, operating environments, and user workflows.
• Use interviews, observation, product analytics, adoption data, experimentation, market research, competitive insight, and business performance to guide recommendations.
• Distinguish scalable platform opportunities from customer‑specific implementation or professional‑services requirements.
• Serve as the platform's senior Product Owner, maintaining a coherent connection among strategy, outcomes, roadmap initiatives, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Maintain a visible, understandable, ordered, and execution‑ready backlog.

Product delivery and lifecycle

• Own the end‑to‑end development process across the backend and front‑end teams - intake, refinement, planning, execution, review, and release - and continuously improve its predictability and throughput.
• Partner with engineering, UX, design, operations, security, compliance, and delivery teams to turn approved priorities into feasible plans.
• Participate in backlog refinement, planning, reviews, product acceptance, release readiness, launches, and post‑release learning.
• Balance new capabilities with platform hardening, usability, reliability, maintainability, defect resolution, customer commitments, and technical debt.
• Establish feedback loops to determine whether released capabilities solve their intended problems and create meaningful user and customer value.
• Use adoption, engagement, customer outcomes, quality, reliability, retention, and business indicators to guide ongoing product decisions.

Team leadership and development

• Directly manage, coach, and develop the backend and front‑end developers, designers, and product owners on the team.
• Lead hiring and onboarding for the three to four additional roles anticipated on the team, in partnership with Talent Acquisition.
• Enable functional leads and senior individual contributors to provide technical guidance, mentorship, and day‑to‑day coordination.
• Build an inclusive, candid, accountable, collaborative, and outcome‑oriented team culture.

Cross-functional leadership

• Serve as the primary product partner, working collaboratively across departments and with executive leadership.
• Partner with the Research & Innovation Lead (to be named) to move validated research into the product roadmap and to keep backend development oversight and product ownership aligned.
• Help determine whether requests belong in the core platform, a reusable application, a partner or business‑unit application, a customer‑funded engagement, or a delivery backlog.
• Partner with go‑to‑market teams on positioning, packaging, launch readiness, customer feedback, and product‑market fit.

Secure and responsible product development

• Incorporate security, privacy, identity, compliance, software supply‑chain, data‑handling, and accreditation considerations into product discovery and prioritization.
• Account for users operating in regulated, controlled, classified, disconnected, or air‑gapped environments.
• Understand how authorization boundaries and deployment models affect requirements, design choices, delivery, and lifecycle decisions.

What you need to have

• At least six years of progressively responsible experience in product management, product ownership, or closely related technology‑product leadership.
• Demonstrated experience directly managing and developing software developers, designers, and product owners as one multidisciplinary product team.
• Experience leading a complex enterprise software, SaaS, platform, API, developer‑platform, AI, data, or cloud product.
• Experience delivering product to U.S. government, defense, or national‑security customers and/or to highly regulated markets.
• Demonstrated success developing product strategy, influencing roadmaps, prioritizing competing demands, and translating user needs into executable product work.
• Experience guiding products through discovery, definition, development, launch, measurement, and lifecycle management.
• Ability to balance customer commitments, platform strategy, technical debt, security, usability, scalability, and business needs.
• Excellent communication skills across executive, customer, technical, and nontechnical audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through cross‑functional influence.
• Working knowledge of Agile and Scrum principles.
• Ability to travel up to 25%.
• Ability to obtain a Department of Defense Secret clearance.

What we'd like you to have

• Experience with generative AI, machine learning, AI platforms, model orchestration, AI agents, retrieval‑augmented generation, model APIs, or AI developer tools.
• Familiarity with FedRAMP, DoD impact levels, authorization boundaries, zero‑trust principles, controlled data, or classified environments.
• Experience supporting products delivered through SaaS, dedicated cloud, on‑premises, edge, or air‑gapped deployment models.
• Experience scaling a product organization or operating model into disciplined enterprise delivery.
• Experience balancing platform development with customer‑specific applications and implementation needs.
• Active DoD security clearance at the Secret level or above.

Pay transparency

Please note the targeted compensation range is provided as an estimate, and any actual compensation offer may vary depending on the needs of the company, or an applicant's skillset, competencies, experience, education, certifications, location, or other factors. The estimated range does not include the value of any benefits offered.

About BigBear.ai

BigBear.ai is a leading provider of AI-powered decision intelligence solutions for national security, supply chain management, and digital identity. Customers and partners rely on Bigbear.ai's predictive analytics capabilities in highly complex, distributed, mission‑based operating environments. Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, BigBear.ai is a public company traded on the NYSE under the symbol BBAI. For more information, visit https://bigbear.ai/ and follow BigBear.ai on LinkedIn: @BigBear.ai and X: @BigBearai.

BigBear.ai is an Equal opportunity employer all protected groups, including protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.