Founding Product Lead

HyperDev AI; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

HyperDev AI is seeking a Founding Product Lead to shape the vision, strategy, and roadmap of a new AI developer platform in Johannesburg. You will work directly with the founders to understand developers, map workflows, and translate insights into practical product briefs and experiences.

You will balance user needs with commercial goals while guiding a small, fast‑moving team. You will own discovery to delivery, partnering with engineering and design to ship meaningful features, validate ideas

Qualifications

• Experience taking a software product from idea to launch and iteration.
• Track record of owning product decisions and delivering outcomes.
• Hands‑on with customer discovery, prioritisation, and close collaboration with engineering and design.
• Strong technical fluency: discuss APIs, integrations, architecture with developers.
• Practical experience shipping AI‑powered products and understanding LLM capabilities and limits.
• Strong product judgment supported by evidence and user experience focus.

Responsibilities

• Define the product direction with Co‑Founders and set a focused roadmap.
• Turn direction into clear prioritisation decisions and explain trade‑offs.
• Stay close to AI and developer tooling to sharpen positioning and product choices.
• Build direct relationships with developers and early customers for feedback.
• Own the product journey from discovery through delivery, launch, and iteration.
• Define acceptance criteria and create user journeys for engineers and designers.

Skills

Product strategy

Customer discovery

Cross‑functional collaboration

Technical fluency

AI‑powered products

User experience judgment

Job description

We're looking for a Founding Product Lead to help define what HyperDev becomes, who we build for, and how we turn an ambitious vision into a product developers love and use.

You’ll work directly with our Founder to own product strategy, customer discovery, and the roadmap, partnering closely with engineering and design to bring ideas to life. You’ll connect what developers need with what our technology can deliver and what will build a sustainable business.

This is a hands-on role. You’ll talk to users, map workflows, prototype ideas, write clear product briefs, and work alongside engineers to ship and improve the experience. You should be comfortable moving between a conversation about company direction and the details of why a developer gets stuck in onboarding.

You’ll bring a founder’s sense of ownership: challenging assumptions, making decisions with incomplete information, and taking responsibility for outcomes after launch. You’ll know when to experiment, when to invest in quality, and when to say "not yet" while keeping the team moving.

Above all, you believe AI should amplify human judgment, and you want to shape how that works in a real product.

Responsibilities

You’ll set the product direction

• Work with our Co-Founders to define the product vision, target users, and the problems HyperDev is best placed to solve
• Turn that direction into a focused roadmap, balancing customer needs, commercial opportunities, and technical constraints
• Make clear prioritisation decisions, explaining what we’re building, why it matters, and what we’re choosing to defer
• Stay close to developments in AI and developer tooling, using that understanding to sharpen our positioning and product choices

You’ll understand developers and validate demand

• Build direct relationships with developers and early customers through interviews, workflow observation, and regular feedback
• Identify where existing tools fall short and which problems are important enough for users to change how they work
• Test assumptions through prototypes, experiments, and early releases before committing substantial engineering time
• Bring customer evidence into everyday decisions and close the loop with users as the product evolves

You’ll turn ideas into useful, well‑crafted software

• Own the product journey from discovery and definition through delivery, launch, and iteration
• Translate problems into clear product briefs, user journeys, and acceptance criteria that give engineering and design room to solve them well
• Work alongside the team to prototype experiences, resolve trade‑offs, and keep delivery focused
• Take responsibility for the details that make developer tools feel intuitive: onboarding, feedback, error recovery, and the path to a first useful result

You’ll Shape How Humans And AI Work Together

• Define where AI should act independently, where people should review or intervene, and how users retain control of the result
• Partner with engineering to evaluate AI‑powered workflows for usefulness, reliability, speed, and cost
• Make transparency, understandable outputs, and recovery from mistakes part of the core product experience
• Treat trust, security, and code ownership as product requirements from the outset

You’ll measure outcomes and help build the business

• Define success measures across activation, engagement, retention, and conversion, with a clear view of the value users receive
• Establish lightweight analytics and feedback loops so the team can see what is working and what needs to change
• Work with our Co-Founders to test pricing, packaging, and routes to market
• Help shape launches, positioning, and product demonstrations that communicate HyperDev’s value clearly
• Use evidence from real usage to decide what to improve, expand, or stop

You’ll help build the founding team and culture

• Establish a practical rhythm for discovery, prioritisation, and delivery that suits a small, fast‑moving team
• Help hire and develop the product and design capabilities we need as we grow
• Build a culture of curiosity, candid feedback, and shared responsibility for customer outcomes
• Keep the team connected to the problem we’re solving and the people we’re solving it for

About Us

At HyperDev, we don’t believe AI replaces developers. We believe it should make them faster, clearer, and more human.

Our platform turns natural language into real, working software while keeping people firmly in the loop. AI generates structure and logic; humans guide intent, judgment, and quality. The result is code that stays understandable, controllable, and owned by the people building it, not a black box you’re afraid to touch.

HyperDev is a spin‑out within the HyperionDev ecosystem, backed by a profitable global tech education company. Our founding team includes engineers who have worked on generative AI models at OpenAI and technical leaders behind award‑winning software products. We’re building tools for developers who want leverage, not autopilot.

If you care about craft as much as speed, and you want to shape how humans and AI build software together, you’ll feel at home here.

Requirements

Minimum:

• Experience taking a software product or significant product area from an early idea through launch and iteration
• A track record of owning product decisions and delivering measurable customer or business outcomes
• Hands‑on experience with customer discovery, prioritisation, and close collaboration with engineering and design
• Strong technical fluency: you can discuss APIs, integrations, architecture, and engineering trade‑offs with developers
• Practical experience building or shipping AI‑powered products, with an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of LLMs
• Strong product judgment and attention to user experience, supported by evidence and an ability to explain your decisions
• Comfort using product data and customer feedback to guide experiments and investment
• The ability to move work forward independently in an early‑stage environment with evolving priorities

Preferred:

• Experience as a founder, founding product hire, or product leader at an early‑stage technology company
• Experience building developer tools, technical SaaS products, or products used by software engineering teams
• A background in software engineering, technical product management, or hands‑on prototyping
• Familiarity with TypeScript, React, Python, LLM APIs, RAG, or agent workflows
• Experience finding product‑market fit, testing pricing, or building a product‑led growth approach
• Experience hiring and growing a small product or cross‑functional team
• Participation in developer communities or open‑source projects

Benefits

Why Join Us?

• Be part of the founding team of a new AI developer platform backed by an established, profitable parent company.
• Shape the architecture, product, and culture of a company from day zero.
• Collaborate with a team that has worked at OpenAI and shipped award‑winning products.
• Access the resources, backing, and reach of the HyperionDev ecosystem while building something new.
• Work on the cutting edge of AI and developer tooling, with the freedom to experiment and innovate.

If you're excited to help build a category‑defining product from the ground up and want the ownership and impact that comes with being a founding engineer, we'd love to talk.