Product Manager

Loftorbital; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

HSA/FSA

Life Insurance

Disability insurance

Paid time off

Holidays

401(k) + equity

Catered lunches

Global exposure

Parental leave

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Loft is hiring a Product Manager to own a significant perimeter and drive cross‑functional collaboration across engineering, BD, and leadership. You will translate strategic direction into concrete requirements, surface strong ideas, and define success metrics for each capability.

Expect deep engagement with customers, partners, and executive stakeholders as Loft accelerates its constellation and onboard AI ecosystem.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience, including hands‑on product management.
• Domain experience in at least one of: earth observation, embedded systems, aerospace systems, security & defense.
• Comfort at both ends of the spectrum — understand the market, and the technology
• Structured and data-driven: you bring your experience and your intuitions, but when you put a recommendation on the table you can show the analysis it stands on.
• Real product obsession: you think about the bigger picture and product-market fit before you think about features.
• Relentless curiosity. In a single month you might move from a satellite bus constraint, to onboard AI inference, to a defense accreditation requirement — and you need to find that stimulating rather than exhausting.
• High autonomy and a bias for action: handed a broad perimeter, you organize it yourself and come back with a plan.
• At ease being challenged, and challenging others, in a fast-moving and demanding environment.
• Working knowledge of both hardware and software development lifecycles.
• Proficient using and configuring Atlassian tools (Jira and Confluence).
• Fluency in English, written and spoken.
• Willingness to travel to other Loft offices and to customers.
• Fluency in French.
• Experience with AI/ML products, edge computing, or developer and partner platforms and ecosystems.
• Experience with satellite operations, constellation services, or ground segment products.
• Exposure to institutional and defense customers and their procurement cycles.
• Experience in a fast-growing, entrepreneurial NewSpace company or venture‑backed deep‑tech startup.
• Professional experience working with international teams across time zones.

Responsibilities

• Own the roadmap for your perimeter, reconciling customer needs, engineering reality, and Loft's strategy into a single coherent plan.
• Build the analysis behind every recommendation — sizing, segmentation, business cases, operational data — so decisions are grounded in evidence rather than intuition alone.
• Negotiate scope and delivery commitments with engineering leadership, and re-plan when capacity or mission timelines shift.
• Challenge, constructively and with data, business development, engineering leadership, and your own assumptions.
• Translate strategic direction into clear requirements and use cases that engineering can act on directly, and follow them down to the Jira tickets.
• Surface and shape the good ideas that come from engineering — many of the best ones do — and connect them to a product rationale.
• Define success criteria for each capability, and verify they are actually met through implementation and delivery.
• Maintain an accurate, shared view of Loft's product capabilities, what is in development, and where the gaps are.
• Run customer discovery interviews alongside business development, and debrief missions to see how Loft's capabilities are actually used in operations.
• Engage directly with the partners building on our platform, including the onboard AI application ecosystem, to understand their needs and constraints.
• Track market trends and competitive moves closely enough to know where our offering stands.
• Own the roadmap for your perimeter, reconciling customer needs, engineering reality, and Loft's strategy into a single coherent plan.
• Build the analysis behind every recommendation — sizing, segmentation, business cases, operational data — so decisions are grounded in evidence rather than intuition alone.

Skills

PM experience

Earth observation

Embedded systems

Aerospace systems

Security & defense

Product obsession

Data-driven

Autonomy

Jira & Confluence

English fluency

French fluency

AI/ML edge

Satellite ops

Defense procurement

NewSpace startup

International teams

Tools

Jira

Confluence

Job description

Wanna join the adventure?

At Loft, we are convinced that space programs should not have to be rebuilt from scratch every time. Our philosophy has been to productize them: we develop our own proprietary technology blocks, hardware and software, so that a customer payload can be integrated faster and more reliably than any bespoke program allows. That approach has delivered — it is why our customers reach orbit in months rather than years, and it is what makes working here different from working in the rest of the industry.

We are now taking the next step: launching and operating our own constellations, and building a new set of services on top of them. That includes a full product suite enabling third‑party AI applications to run directly onboard our satellites, and a growing ecosystem of partners whose needs we have to understand and design for. Loft is expanding at a very high pace, and the range of what we build is expanding just as fast.

This is why Product Management matters so much here. Someone has to hold the whole picture — what is technically possible, what customers actually need, what we should build first — and turn it into something engineering and leadership can act on. As a Product Manager, you will own a significant perimeter and the autonomy that goes with it. We are growing the team precisely so that each of us can go deeper on our topics, anticipate rather than react, and have more impact across the company.

You will need to be comfortable talking to anyone here. In the same week you might sit with a system engineer to understand a design constraint, join a BD call with an institutional customer, and present a recommendation to the executive team. Ideas at Loft get discussed openly and on their merits, wherever they come from, so being able to ask a naive question without ego — and to disagree with someone senior without making it personal — matters more than seniority.

Understand what is possible, and turn it into requirements

• Spend the bulk of your time with engineering: understanding architectures, constraints, and dependencies well enough to judge what is realistically doable in a given timeframe.
• Translate strategic direction into clear requirements and use cases that engineering can act on directly, and follow them down to the Jira tickets.
• Surface and shape the good ideas that come from engineering — many of the best ones do — and connect them to a product rationale.
• Define success criteria for each capability, and verify they are actually met through implementation and delivery.
• Maintain an accurate, shared view of Loft's product capabilities, what is in development, and where the gaps are.

Bring the outside in

• Run customer discovery interviews alongside business development, and debrief missions to see how Loft's capabilities are actually used in operations.
• Engage directly with the partners building on our platform, including the onboard AI application ecosystem, to understand their needs and constraints.
• Track market trends and competitive moves closely enough to know where our offering stands.

Decide and prioritize

• Own the roadmap for your perimeter, reconciling customer needs, engineering reality, and Loft's strategy into a single coherent plan.
• Build the analysis behind every recommendation — sizing, segmentation, business cases, operational data — so decisions are grounded in evidence rather than intuition alone.
• Negotiate scope and delivery commitments with engineering leadership, and re-plan when capacity or mission timelines shift.
• Challenge, constructively and with data, business development, engineering leadership, and your own assumptions.

Communicate

• Own internal communication on your perimeter: keep engineering, program leadership, and executives working from the same technical reality.
• Develop the technical narratives and proof points that marketing and BD then turn into their own customer-facing material.
• Prepare recommendations and presentations for top-executive-level audiences.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience, including hands‑on product management.
• Domain experience in at least one of: earth observation, embedded systems, aerospace systems, security & defense.
• Comfort at both ends of the spectrum — understand the market, and the technology
• Structured and data-driven: you bring your experience and your intuitions, but when you put a recommendation on the table you can show the analysis it stands on.
• Real product obsession: you think about the bigger picture and product-market fit before you think about features.
• Relentless curiosity. In a single month you might move from a satellite bus constraint, to onboard AI inference, to a defense accreditation requirement — and you need to find that stimulating rather than exhausting.
• High autonomy and a bias for action: handed a broad perimeter, you organize it yourself and come back with a plan.
• At ease being challenged, and challenging others, in a fast-moving and demanding environment.
• Working knowledge of both hardware and software development lifecycles.
• Proficient using and configuring Atlassian tools (Jira and Confluence).
• Fluency in English, written and spoken.
• Willingness to travel to other Loft offices and to customers.
• Fluency in French.
• Experience with AI/ML products, edge computing, or developer and partner platforms and ecosystems.
• Experience with satellite operations, constellation services, or ground segment products.
• Exposure to institutional and defense customers and their procurement cycles.
• Experience in a fast-growing, entrepreneurial NewSpace company or venture‑backed deep‑tech startup.
• Professional experience working with international teams across time zones.

Benefits

• 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance option for employees and dependents
• Flexible Spending (FSA) and Health Savings (HSA) Accounts offered with an employer contribution to the HSA
• 100% employer paid Life, AD&D, Short-Term, and Long-Term Disability insurance
• Flexible Time Off policy for vacation and sick leave, and 12 paid holidays
• 401(k) plan and equity options
• Daily catered lunches and snacks
• International exposure to our team in France
• Fully paid parental leave; 14 weeks for primary caregiver and 10 weeks for secondary caregiver
• Carrot Fertility provides comprehensive, inclusive fertility healthcare and family‑forming benefits with financial support
• Off‑sites and many social events and celebrations
• Relocation assistance when applicable

Who We Are

Loft: Space Made Simple.

Founded in 2017, Loft provides governments, companies, and research institutions with a fast, reliable, and simple way to deploy missions in orbit.

We integrate, launch, and operate spacecraft, offering end‑to‑end missions as a service across Earth observation, IoT connectivity, on‑orbit AI, national security missions, and more. Leveraging our existing space infrastructure and an extensive inventory of satellite buses, Loft is reducing years‑long integration and launch timelines to months. With more than 30 missions flown, Loft’s flight heritage and proven technologies enable customers to focus on their mission objectives.

With a growing fleet on track to reach 30 satellites by 2027, we are scaling up quickly across our offices in San Francisco, CA | Golden, CO | and Toulouse, France to meet accelerating demand for space infrastructure.

As an international company your resume will be reviewed by people across our offices so please attach a copy in English.