Director of Product Management

Rational Dynamics; Berkeley (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Rational Dynamics in Berkeley, CA, seeks a Director of Product Management to own the full lifecycle of AI products for high-stakes decision making in institutional investing. Reporting to the President, you will shape product vision, prototype rapidly with AI tools, and scale solutions through engineering and research partnerships.

You will hire and grow a team of product leaders, establish feedback loops from live deployments, and drive speed, clarity, and measurable customer value across a

Qualifications

• Significant product management leadership experience in enterprise technology products.
• Proven end-to-end product ownership from discovery to roadmap management.
• Experience prototyping with AI-native tools and turning ideas into working artifacts.
• Delivery of LLM-centered products where AI capabilities are core to the customer experience.
• Strong technical fluency and judgment in AI-enabled systems.

Responsibilities

• Engage with customers to identify high-value problems and translate them into product direction.
• Define initial product set to drive scalable revenue growth.
• Own end-to-end product lifecycle from discovery to iteration and launch.
• Build rapid prototypes, demos, and workflows using AI-native tools.
• Turn ambiguous input into clear strategy and prioritization with strong tradeoffs.
• Partner with commercial teams to position offerings across stakeholders.
• Collaborate with engineering, research, and forward-deployed teams to deliver solutions.
• Transform customer solutions into scalable products and platform capabilities.
• Lead and develop product leaders and managers.
• Establish tight feedback loops from input and usage data to evolve the roadmap.

Skills

Leadership

Product ownership

AI/LLM fluency

Builder mindset

Startup experience

Education

Advanced degree

Tools

AI-native tools

Prototype tooling

Job description

The Company

Rational Dynamics builds customized AI reasoning systems for tasks of high cognitive complexity.

Our initial market is the world’s leading institutional asset owners. We work very closely with these customers to create specialized, rigorous benchmark datasets encompassing their most valuable and difficult knowledge work. Then we use the benchmarks to construct agentic large reasoning models, applying the same rigor to prove that the models correctly do the work. Customers access the models through a tailored application service, making their most skilled, expensive workers dramatically more productive.

We are an early-stage startup. Our founders previously started Voleon, now one of the world’s largest systematic investment managers, and recognized as a longstanding industry leader in applied machine learning. They bring to Rational Dynamics the same research discipline and data-driven focus that succeeded in the unforgiving, high-stakes setting of financial markets.

Job Description

As Director of Product Management, you will own the full product lifecycle for Rational Dynamics’ AI products, from customer discovery, defining product vision, and rapid prototyping through launch, iteration, and scale. Reporting to the President as a member of the senior leadership team, you will help define how enterprises use AI to transform high-cognitive-complexity workflows, starting with high-stakes decision-making for institutional investors.

This is a senior leadership role, but not a purely managerial one. You will be a deep customer expert and set high-level product direction while also operating as a hands‑on builder: rapidly turning customer problems into working prototypes, pressure‑testing ideas with modern AI‑native tools, and partnering deeply with engineering and research to convert bespoke solutions into repeatable products. You will hire a team of product leaders, raise the quality of product thinking across the company, and ensure we are building products that create differentiated insight and measurable customer value.

Responsibilities

• Engage deeply with customers to become the company’s leading expert on their needs, identifying high-value problems and translating them into product direction.

• Define an initial product set that drives scalable revenue growth.

• Set an inspiring product vision that attracts customers and aligns builders at Rational Dynamics. Own the end‑to‑end product lifecycle across discovery, strategy, prototyping, specification, launch, and iteration.

• Personally build rapid prototypes, demos, and workflow experiments using AI‑native prototyping and coding tools to accelerate learning and decision‑making.

• Turn ambiguous customer input and emerging technical capabilities into clear product strategy, priorities, and execution plans, making sharp tradeoffs on sequencing and business impact rather than following process for process’s sake.

• Partner closely with commercial teams to position offerings effectively across multiple internal stakeholders within customer organizations.

• Partner closely with engineering, research, and forward‑deployed teams to deliver successful customer solutions.

• Transform customer‑specific solutions into scalable products and platform capabilities

• Lead and develop a team of product leaders and product managers; set a high bar for judgment, communication, and ownership.

• Establish tight feedback loops across customer input, usage data from live deployments, competitive developments and internal technical teams so the roadmap evolves quickly as the market changes.

• Shape the company’s product culture around speed, insight, clarity, and hands‑on execution, with crisp metrics guiding team delivery, customer success, and product quality.

Requirements

• Significant product management leadership experience, including leading enterprise technology products from zero to one.

• Proven track record of full‑stack product ownership: discovery, prototyping, requirements, launch, customer iteration, and roadmap management.

• Demonstrated ability to personally prototype products and workflows using modern AI‑native tools; this role requires a builder who can move from idea to working artifact quickly.

• Demonstrated delivery of LLM‑centered products – where LLM capabilities are prominent in the actual customer experience, not just part of the development environment.

• Strong technical fluency and product judgment in AI‑enabled systems, including LLM‑powered applications, workflow tooling, data products, APIs, or adjacent platform technologies.

• Highly flexible and effective in fast‑changing environments where the product, customer, and approach may evolve rapidly.

• Startup experience – resourceful, hands‑on where needed, comfortable learning and pivoting quickly in pursuit of customer delight and business success.

• Clear, collaborative and inspiring communicator who can align customers, executives, engineers and researchers around decisions and tradeoffs.

• Relentless curiosity, learning, and improvement; you actively adopt new tools, methods, and technologies to increase product velocity and quality.

• Demonstrated experience managing and developing product leaders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Institutional investing experience such as institutional asset allocation or private equity.

• Strong design and workflow intuition, especially for products that simplify complex expert work

• Advanced degree in computer science, business, or a related field

Equal Opportunity Employer

Rational Dynamics is an Equal Opportunity employer. Applicants are considered without regard to race, color, religion, creed, national origin, age, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation and identity, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship, or any other factors prohibited by local, state, or federal law.