Product Manager
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Job Summary
At Loft we are convinced that space programs should not have to be rebuilt from scratch every time. Our philosophy has been to productize them: we develop our own proprietary technology blocks hardware and software so that a customer payload can be integrated faster and more reliably than any bespoke program allows. That approach has delivered it is why our customers reach orbit in months rather than years and it is what makes working here different from working in the rest of the industry.
We are now taking the next step: launching and operating our own constellations and building a new set of services on top of them. That includes a full product suite enabling third-party AI applications to run directly onboard our satellites and a growing ecosystem of partners whose needs we have to understand and design for. Loft is expanding at a very high pace and the range of what we build is expanding just as fast.
This is why Product Management matters so much here. Someone has to hold the whole picture what is technically possible what customers actually need what we should build first and turn it into something engineering and leadership can act on. As a Product Manager you will own a significant perimeter and the autonomy that goes with it. We are growing the team precisely so that each of us can go deeper on our topics anticipate rather than react and have more impact across the company.
You will need to be comfortable talking to anyone the same week you might sit with a system engineer to understand a design constraint join a BD call with an institutional customer and present a recommendation to the executive team. Ideas at Loft get discussed openly and on their merits wherever they come from so being able to ask a naive question without ego and to disagree with someone senior without making it personal matters more than seniority.
- Spend the bulk of your time with engineering: understanding architectures constraints and dependencies well enough to judge what is realistically doable in a given timeframe.
- Translate strategic direction into clear requirements and use cases that engineering can act on directly and follow them down to the Jira tickets.
- Surface and shape the good ideas that come from engineering many of the best ones do and connect them to a product rationale.
- Define success criteria for each capability and verify they are actually met through implementation and delivery.
- Maintain an accurate shared view of Lofts product capabilities what is in development and where the gaps are.
Bring the outside in
- Run customer discovery interviews alongside business development and debrief missions to see how Lofts capabilities are actually used in operations.
- Engage directly with the partners building on our platform including the onboard AI application ecosystem to understand their needs and constraints.
- Track market trends and competitive moves closely enough to know where our offering stands.
Decide and prioritize
- Own the roadmap for your perimeter reconciling customer needs engineering reality and Lofts strategy into a single coherent plan.
- Build the analysis behind every recommendation sizing segmentation business cases operational data so decisions are grounded in evidence rather than intuition alone.
- Negotiate scope and delivery commitments with engineering leadership and re-plan when capacity or mission timelines shift.
- Challenge constructively and with data business development engineering leadership and your own assumptions.
Communicate
- Own internal communication on your perimeter: keep engineering program leadership and executives working from the same technical reality.
- Develop the technical narratives and proof points that marketing and BD then turn into their own customer-facing material.
- Prepare recommendations and presentations for top-executive-level audiences.
- 7 years of professional experience including hands-on product management.
- Domain experience in at least one of: earth observation embedded systems aerospace systems security & defense.
- Comfort at both ends of the spectrum understand the market and the technology
- Structured and data-driven: you bring your experience and your intuitions but when you put a recommendation on the table you can show the analysis it stands on.
- Real product obsession: you think about the bigger picture and product-market fit before you think about features.
- Relentless a single month you might move from a satellite bus constraint to onboard AI inference to a defense accreditation requirement and you need to find that stimulating rather than exhausting.
- High autonomy and a bias for action: handed a broad perimeter you organize it yourself and come back with a plan.
- At ease being challenged and challenging others in a fast-moving and demanding environment.
- Working knowledge of both hardware and software development lifecycles.
- Proficient using and configuring Atlassian tools (Jira and Confluence).
- Fluency in English written and spoken.
- Willingness to travel to other Loft offices and to customers.
- Fluency in French.
- Experience with AI/ML products edge computing or developer and partner platforms and ecosystems.
- Experience with satellite operations constellation services or ground segment products.
- Exposure to institutional and defense customers and their procurement cycles.
- Experience in a fast-growing entrepreneurial NewSpace company or venture-backed deep-tech startup.
- Professional experience working with international teams across time zones.
- Equity we want you to have an active role in our success
- Up to 35 days of Paid Time Off (vacations & RTT ) and flexible working hours we want you to be at your best
- Health and life insurance we care about your health
- Lunch Vouchers because lets be honest we love food! (we even have a slack channel about it #loft-gourmand)
- Cross-office travel opportunities between San Francisco Colorado and Toulouse to learn from our differences
- Company and team off-sites and many other events to work & celebrate together
- Relocation assistance to Toulouse when applicable
Required Experience:
IC
About Company
Loft Orbital builds software and hardware products to fly and operate any payload on a standard satellite bus. See how we're making space simple.
