Head of Product

About the company

Our client is an early-stage software company.

The role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Act as the first product hire, partnering with founders, engineers and early users to decide what gets built. The work starts from a blank slate and covers discovery, defining the product experience and setting up the way priorities are chosen.

What you'll do

• Decide product direction through frequent conversations with users and prospects, looking for areas where the offering can be dramatically better than current options.
• Distill similar needs across different sectors into reusable approaches so the platform grows cleanly instead of turning into custom one-offs.
• Develop strong working relationships with early design partners and convert their loosely defined needs into dependable features.
• Guide the design of workflows, interfaces and core concepts that users rely on to work with the underlying technology.
• Collaborate daily with engineers from early concept through release, prototyping ideas, weighing options and drafting specs where they help.
• Make timely calls on what to start and what to hold off on, even when information is limited.
• Set up a clear, disciplined method for ranking work and saying no to ideas that do not merit effort.
• Connect customer usage, experiments, interviews and product analytics into a repeatable loop that informs the next set of priorities.

What we're looking for

• At least 6 years in product roles, with a record of guiding complex technical products from an uncertain starting point to something customers value, ideally in a startup or a very independent team.
• Balanced judgment that weighs user needs, technical feasibility and commercial impact together.
• Ability to discuss system design topics with engineers, such as interfaces, data pipelines, model behavior and performance, without needing to code in production.
• Real curiosity about AI, with hands-on experience building with it and informed views on where it adds product value.
• Sharp discovery skills, including finding the true need behind a request and separating pressing problems from merely interesting ones.
• Willingness to work full-time and in person on-site.

Bonus points

• Past product work involving imagery, mapping or other spatial data.
• Background with technical platforms or highly technical products aimed at specialist users.
• Exposure to sectors where physical-world data matters, such as defense, energy, logistics, insurance or agriculture.
• Experience in customer-embedded or discovery-heavy roles at a fast-moving startup.

Location and work model

• San Francisco, CA, United States
• On-site, in person
• Full-time