Product Manager

Sanlam Limited; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Sanlam Limited is hiring a product manager to lead the AI Engineering pod, owning the internal platform and guiding the journey from alpha to a production-ready product. You will work with Sanlam engineers, security, and leadership to define scope, manage the roadmap, and ensure successful adoption within the organisation.

Success requires executive communication, robust metrics, and a bias for action in a regulated financial services environment.

Qualifications

• Five or more years of product management experience, especially for developer-facing/platform products in a cloud context.
• Hands-on familiarity with AI coding agents, LLM-based products, and cost/trust considerations.
• Ability to work with autonomous engineering teams and security/compliance stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define and own alpha roadmap from secure foundation to cockpit MVP and roll-out.
• Onboard and engage Sanlam engineers to drive platform adoption and feedback.
• Define and track product metrics and SLOs, including cost-per-feature and security sign-offs.
• Turn alpha into a scalable product and contribute to market positioning.

Skills

Product management

AI engineering

Stakeholder management

Cloud / dev tooling

Tools

LLM platforms

APIs

Job description

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Sanlam was established as a life insurance company in South Africa but has since transformed into a diversified financial services group that operates across the African continent, India, Malaysia and selected developed markets, with listings on the Johannesburg, A2X and Namibian Securities Stock exchanges. In 2018 the Group celebrated its centenary as well as 20 years since demutualisation and listing in South Africa and Namibia. Sanlam is one of the largest internationally active insurance groups in the world with a presence in 27 countries and has the biggest non-banking financial services footprint on the African continent.

The Group's four business clusters (Sanlam Life and Savings, Sanlam Investment Group, Sanlam Allianz and Santam) house the Group's business operations. The Group Office provides strategic direction and support to the four clusters, assisting them in realising their strategies and meeting their business objectives. The Group Office is responsible for governance and for the Group's centralised functions, which include: Group Tecnhnology, Finance, Actuarial, Risk and Balance Sheet Management, Strategy, Human Capital, Brand, Marketing and Corporate Affairs. The Group Office ensures cohesive management across the organisation.

Position Overview

We're on a transformation journey to be an innovative company at the forefront of the financial services industry's digital transformation. By harnessing advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, we aim to redefine the financial landscape — and to be a net producer of technology rather than a net consumer. Product Managers are a critical part of this mission.
This is a hands-on internal product role: you are the Product Manager for the AI Engineering pod, and the product owner for the platform it builds. Your users are Sanlam's own engineers, team leads and security function. You'll set direction, own the roadmap through the internal alpha, run the feedback loop, and shape the pod's work into the product that becomes Codeship — where the AI-native PM suite you help define is itself part of the offering. You will be the first product hire; there is no team to manage yet, but there is a company to help shape
Sanlam Fintech x is a business unit at Sanlam and it's standing up a small, senior AI Engineering pod with one mandate: make AI engineering agents a safe, governed, everyday part of how Sanlam builds software. We are a net producer of technology, not a consumer — and regulated financial services cannot simply ship source code, architectural context and customer data to a vendor's cloud. The pod builds the in-tenant agentic engineering stack that makes the productivity gain available inside our own boundary.
The pod's five focus areas:

• Context & memory — giving models the right organisational and engineering context at the right time, with team-wide RBAC in place.
• Agentic orchestration — multi-agent workflows that take features from story to production across our services.
• Production incident resolution — agents that triage, trace and propose fixes for live incidents.
• Developer enablement — reusable AI skills and team context that raise the floor for every engineer.
• Agents for engineering teams — assisting with agile workflows, backlogs and delivery visibility.

What will you do?

• Achieve a free flow of information between internal users and the pod.
  Run continuous user research with Sanlam engineering teams, team leads and the CISO's office to understand needs, blockers and willingness to adopt. Own alpha onboarding — getting the first Sanlam developer using the platform daily, then the first team. Success is measured by adoption and by value created by users on the platform.
• Give engineers the context and clarity they need to deliver the roadmap.
  Own the phased alpha roadmap (secure foundation → core loop → cockpit MVP → harden & roll out) and make each phase's single demonstrable outcome unambiguous. Write the "what" so well that agents can pick it up, and the "why" so well that engineers care. Success is on-time, in-full phase gates and team engagement.
• Define and measure success openly.
  Define the platform's success metrics and SLOs: adoption, satisfaction, cost-per-feature, agent-run reliability, latency and token cost. Make cost-per-feature a metric a CFO would trust. Own the CISO sign-off checklist as a product deliverable. Success is continuous improvement on the metrics and unanimous buy-in on their definitions.
• Turn the alpha into a product.
  Capture structured feedback into the v2 roadmap, dogfood the AI native backlog tooling the pod builds, contribute to the Codeship positioning and first-customer narrative, and be ready to hire and grow product talent as the company scales.

Qualification and Experience

• 5+ years' product management experience, with at least 2 years on developer-facing or platform products (internal platforms, dev tooling, APIs, data/ML platforms) in a modern cloud context.
• Hands-on familiarity with AI coding agents and LLM-based products — you have used them, shipped with them, or built on them, and you have a point of view on evals, cost and trust.
• Comfortable working with autonomous, high-performing engineering teams and with security/compliance stakeholders (data residency, POPIA, RBAC, audit).
• Experience defining and tracking product metrics and SLOs; exposure to budget and cost-of-compute thinking is a plus.
• Excellent communication — you can brief an engineer, a team lead and a CISO in the same afternoon and be understood by all three

What will make you successful in this role?

• You look for ways to do, instead of reasons not to.
  You are high agency, high ownership. If something keeps us from the mission, you own it or find the right owner.
• Where some see impossible, you see a way.
  Regulated enterprises are "locked out" of agentic engineering.You see that as the opportunity, not the obstacle.
• You move fast and fix things.
  You publish early and often; when you fail you learn and go again.Speed gives you the licence to course-correct.
• You love creating more with less.
  A pod of five, inside one tenant, proving a product for an entire market. Scale is in your thinking from day one.
• You seek out and value different perspectives.
  Engineers, security, finance and the business each see the platform differently — you make the product better by listening to all of them.

Build a successful career with us

We’re all about building strong, lasting relationships with our employees. We know that you have hopes for your future – your career, your personal development and of achieving great things. We pride ourselves in helping our employees to realise their worth.Through its five business clusters – Sanlam Fintech, Sanlam Life and Savings, Sanlam Investment Group, Sanlam Allianz, Santam, as well as MiWay and the Group Office – the group provides many opportunities for growth and development.

Turnaround time

The shortlisting process will only start once the application due date has been reached. The time taken to complete this process will depend on how far you progress and the availability of managers.

Our commitment to transformation

The Sanlam Group is committed to achieving transformation and embraces diversity. This commitment is what drives us to achieve a diverse, inclusive and equitable workplace as we believe that these are key components to ensuring a thriving and sustainable business in South Africa. The Group's Employment Equity plan and targets will be considered as part of the selection process.