Product Manager - Digital Proving Grounds

Description

The company builds digital infrastructure for physical AI, aiming to bring intelligence to every moving machine. Founded in 2017, it is a Silicon Valley firm valued at $15 billion.

It serves the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries across three areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems, and autonomy. Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers, along with the United States military and its allies, rely on its solutions.

Headquarters are in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C., San Diego, Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, Ann Arbor, Michigan, London, Stuttgart, Munich, Stockholm, Bangalore, Seoul and Tokyo.

Digital Proving Grounds let the Department of War test autonomous systems from many vendors together, in one shared setting, against a real mission before they are fielded. They span software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulation, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL), live-virtual-constructive (LVC) and live exercises. Integration issues surface in simulation, where a fix takes hours, rather than at a live event, where it takes weeks.

The defense toolchain behind these grounds centers on its simulation core. The company ran VREX for the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, which combined air, surface and undersea vehicles from different vendors in one mission. CDAO then chose the company to build the platform for Autonomy Factory, extending the approach to autonomy programs across the Department of War.

The technology works in programs. The goal now is a product that program offices, test organizations and mission engineers can pick up, adopt and keep using without company engineers running events.

You will own the product strategy, roadmap and requirements for Digital Proving Grounds and the simulation core. This is an individual contributor role: you act as the product counterpart to the simulation engineering lead and drive results across engineering, design, business development and delivery through influence rather than direct reports.

Responsibilities

• Set the product vision, strategy and roadmap, and decide which work becomes repeatable product and which stays specific to one program.
• Run discovery with program offices, test and evaluation groups, mission engineers and autonomy vendors to learn who buys, what they must prove, and what brings them back for the next event.
• Partner with business development and capture to turn those findings into offers that win programs.
• Define the sim-to-live workflow, from a mission and its concept of operations through test scenarios, SIL at scale, HIL rig checkout, LVC and live events, with results carried across every stage.
• Make roadmap calls with engineering on fidelity versus speed, sensor and communications modeling, scaling to hundreds or thousands of agents, co-simulation with government tools, and self-serve access in the cloud and on accredited networks.
• Work with the other defense toolchain product leads so DPGs share common components (simulation, campaigns, metrics, jobs) instead of separate versions.
• Write clear requirements and success metrics, and make scope trade-offs that keep engineering focused on what matters most for upcoming programs and events.
• Work with design on the tools that test planners, vendors and government evaluators use every day.
• Communicate strategy, status, risk and trade-offs to company leadership and customers, and present at test events, program reviews and industry conferences.

Requirements

• A bachelor's degree in a technical field such as computer science or engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of product management experience shipping complex technical products, including end-to-end ownership of a simulation, test or engineering platform used by technical teams.
• Deep simulation knowledge: fidelity, sensor models, determinism, distributed simulation at scale and HIL, enough to discuss them with engineers and judge when a result can be trusted.
• Strong customer research: you have learned a new domain by talking to and observing users, including hard-to-reach groups such as regulated industries, cleared environments and field teams, and turned that into a prioritized roadmap.
• A record of moving a technical product from custom, per-customer deployments to a repeatable product that customers adopt and renew.
• Comfort owning a whole product as an individual contributor, driving cross-functional results through influence rather than direct reports.
• Clear written and spoken communication with engineers and with senior government and industry leaders.
• Experience with modeling and simulation standards and government tools, such as DIS, HLA, AFSIM, NGTS or co-simulation frameworks.
• Experience planning or running LVC, range or large-scale test events.
• Experience with multi-agent or collaborative autonomy, swarms or communications modeling.
• Familiarity with DoD test and evaluation, mission engineering or acquisition processes.
• An active US Secret or Top Secret clearance.
• You must be a US citizen.
• You must hold or be eligible for a US Secret security clearance.

Conditions

The company works in person: full-time employees are expected to work from the office five days a week, with flexibility for occasional remote work, such as starting with morning meetings from home or leaving early for family commitments. This in-office expectation does not apply to contractor positions.

Expect to travel about 25% of the time to customer sites, test ranges and events.

For US-based roles, reasonable accommodations are available for applicants with disabilities, medical conditions or disabled veterans, and requesting one does not affect candidacy or require disclosing the condition.