Staff Product Manager (Runtime Team)

PolyAI automates customer service through lifelike voice assistants that let customers lead a conversation. Our voice assistants make it possible for businesses to deliver outstanding customer service that rivals their human agents.

Our customers, which include the world’s leading logos, are expanding how they use our platform, driving automation of critical customer service operations and integrating PolyAI into their daily customer service workflows.

We’re looking for a highly technical, senior product leader to own the platform underneath everything our agents do: the runtime that serves conversations in production, the inference layer that powers our models, and the data infrastructure that feeds both. This is a deep infrastructure role with direct exposure to latency, cost, and reliability tradeoffs at scale, not a roadmap-and-backlog role. You’ll set strategy for areas other teams build on top of, working closely with engineering leadership rather than through them

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own the product strategy for runtime (how conversations get served in production), inference (how our models are hosted and served, including self-hosted and third-party paths), and the data platform (how conversation and model data moves, is stored, and is queried across the business)
• Set direction on build-vs-buy and self-host-vs-managed tradeoffs for model serving, including evaluating cost, latency, and scaling implications of infrastructure decisions before they’re made, not after
• Build and own the evaluation framework for how we measure runtime and inference performance in production (latency, throughput, cost per minute/token, failure rates), and drive continuous improvement off that data
• Partner directly with infrastructure and platform engineering leadership to sequence a technical roadmap that often has no visible customer-facing surface, and defend its priority against features that do
• Own how conversation data flows into and out of the platform, including data residency, retention, and access-control tradeoffs that affect what the business can build or sell
• Translate ambiguous technical constraints (capacity limits, model failure modes, data gaps) into decisions the rest of the business can plan around
• Lead and influence a cross-functional group of engineers, data scientists, and infrastructure specialists without formal authority over them
• Represent this area in exec-level conversations on cost, capacity planning, and platform risk

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 6+ years of product management or related technical experience, including a strong track record owning infrastructure, ML/data platform, or runtime-adjacent products, not just user-facing features
• Bachelor’s degree (or foreign equivalent) in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or a related field involving AI/ML or distributed systems, or equivalent industry experience
• Strong working knowledge of how inference and model-serving infrastructure actually works: latency budgets, GPU/node economics, self-hosted vs. managed serving tradeoffs
• Comfortable owning a roadmap with no end-user-visible surface, and able to make the business case for infrastructure investment on its own terms
• Experience with data platform decisions: pipelines, residency/compliance constraints, and tradeoffs between centralizing vs. fragmenting data by region or product line
• Demonstrated ability to operate at a senior level: setting direction, not just executing against someone else’s plan, and mentoring more junior PMs
• Entrepreneurial mindset, comfortable with ambiguity and fast iteration in a high-growth environment
• Exceptional cross-functional communication skills, particularly translating infrastructure tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders

Compensation

We offer a competitive base salary, shaped by your experience and location, plus equity — so you share in the value you help create.

Benefits

💰 Participation in the company’s employee share options plan

🏝 Tenure-Based PTO: You will receive 25 holidays when you join and will gain an additional 1 day after 2 years of service, then 1 day each year until capped at 32 holidays

🏡 Flexible working from home policy

🌎 Work from outside of the UK for up to 6 months each year

🫂TELUS Health EAP 24/7 - offers you and your chosen family confidential, judgment-free support for any work, health, or life challenge

🧡 Enhanced parental leave

🚲 Bike2Work scheme

📚 Annual learning and development allowance

🏡 We’re all about making WFH work for you - that’s why we offer a one-off WFH allowance when you join. Offering perks like noise-cancelling headphones or a comfortable desk chair to boost your comfort and focus!

👨‍👩‍👧 Company-funded fertility and family-forming programmes

🌸 Menopause care programme with Maven

🏥 Private healthcare and dental cover, discounts on gym members and relaxation apps, and access to a range of mental health programs

🌎 Sabbatical Program: 5-week paid sabbatical available after 5 years of employment