Senior Product Manager - Defense Autonomy and Perception job at TurbineOne in Washington, DC
Title: Senior Product Manager - Defense Autonomy and Perception Location: Washington DC Job Description: Location: Remote/Hybrid (Travel as needed for field/user engagement) About TurbineOne TurbineOne is pioneering resilient, edge-first autonomy, perception, and decision support for the modern warfighter. Our Frontline Perception System (FPS) brings advanced AI to the point of action—delivering operator-driven, adaptable intelligence in the world’s most demanding defense environments. Your Mission We’re hiring a strategic, product-minded leader who partners across the company — mission teams, sales/BD, product design, engineering, and field engineering — to define a multi-year vision for decision support to intelligence, threat recognition, autonomy and edge AI and then operationalize it into mission-ready releases. You’ll translate frontline user pain points, contract signals, market direction, and sales feedback into a coherent product strategy, prioritize features across the portfolio, and drive delivery and enablement in the field. What You’ll Do Work across T1: Serve as the product management liaison across mission, sales/business development, product design, engineering leadership, technical program management, field engineering, information security, and various other disciplines so product decisions reflect operational realities, market needs, and technical constraints. Prioritize portfolio features: Help prioritize features across programs and products by evaluating mission impact, technical risk, customer value, and commercial/contract drivers; recommend tradeoffs and sequencing. Support engineering decisions: Help engineers and team leads make design and architecture selections by defining success criteria, documenting tradeoffs (cost, complexity, schedule, field operability), and facilitating technical decision reviews. Market & competitive insight: Monitor market and technology trends, gather competitive intelligence, and translate that insight into strategic product direction and roadmap choices. Field-inclusive product discovery: Deeply engage with operators and field engineers; synthesize field feedback, demo learnings, and “duct-tape” solutions into prioritized product work that reduces operational friction. Translate contracts to delivery: Vet contract asks and converts ambiguous requirements into sequenced milestones and deliverable product features aligned to strategic objectives. Enablement & scale: Champion product-led enablement—create configuration patterns and UX/workflows that empower field teams to operate independently and increase unit self-sufficiency. Deliver & iterate: Partner with TPMs and engineering to de-risk delivery, maintain prioritized backlogs, define acceptance criteria, and run retrospectives to continuously improve. Tell the product story: Create concise product narratives to support sales, mission stakeholders, and leadership that explain tradeoffs, impact, and roadmap rationale. What You’ll Bring Proven product leadership with ownership of roadmaps and delivery; domain preference for autonomy/edge AI, IoT, defense/fielded systems, or defense SaaS. Strong technical literacy or engineering background; comfortable partnering with engineering managers/leadership and architects on system tradeoffs. Deep field/customer orientation and experience converting operational feedback into product requirements. Demonstrated ability to prioritize across a portfolio and to present clear tradeoffs and decisions. Excellent communication and storytelling skills for aligning engineering, business development/sales, mission teams, and leadership. Servant-leader and collaborative mindset: act as a peer to technical leads, support technical program managers, and build trust with sales and field teams. Practical familiarity with product tooling and coordination practices (Jira or similar, RACI, etc.). Willingness to travel; mission-driven. Bonus: Experience with defense acquisition cycles, autonomy research, plugin/module architectures, or product-led enablement. How you’ll work Context-first: Gather constraints, mission inputs, and market signals before deciding; document assumptions and rationale. Cross-team collaborator: Facilitate pragmatic, respectful alignment across sales, mission, design, engineering, and field teams. Engineer-friendly: Provide clear decision frameworks, acceptance criteria, and tradeoff analyses to help engineers make confident technical choices. Outcome-driven: Define success up front, instrument outcomes, and iterate based on telemetry and field validation. Proactive communicator: Publish roadmaps, PRDs, decision logs, and field readiness artifacts; ensure tools reflect confirmed commitments. Scale enablement: Convert recurring field work into product features, runbooks, and self-service patterns. Success / impact Measured by increased mission effectiveness, field readiness, and adoption across customers. Success looks like prioritized roadmaps backed by market insight, releases that support sales and reduce field friction, engineering choices that balance risk and mission value, and demonstrable progress toward the multi-year vision.