Founding Product Manager

**Here's the tl;dr**:

- ** We are on a mission** to make programming biology easy. We provide biologists with the software, machine learning & services to discover, design and optimise enzymes and their cell-factories to ultimately produce almost anything.
- We're an **experienced team**. We have built many successful products before and we have raised enough funds to have plenty of runway for the years to come
- We're focused on building the **best possible team culture**. We're distributed across two locations, and are flexible about when and where we work.
- We offer **top of the market** salary, a generous equity stake in the company and a wide range of benefits from health and wellbeing, financial, to training and career progression opportunities.

**This is Cradle**:
Cradle helps teams to engineer proteins with fewer, more successful experiments. We use generative machine learning models, accessible through user-friendly software interfaces, to help engineer protein properties such as stability, expression, activity, binding affinity and specificity. We are bridge builders who bring together the best of machine learning, synthetic biology, developer tools, and user experience design. Our mission is to enable a world where most of the products around us can be easily made and degraded biologically using a cell-factory instead of (petro-)chemicals, plants or animal agriculture.

**Summary**

As our first Product Manager, you work alongside our founders and directly with our 20 person engineering & biology team to build the world’s best ML-driven protein engineering platform. Success means the scientists that are improving plenary and human health with biology get to improve their protein products in record time. You work with our clients, their users, and just about everyone on the team to get our products and features from conception to launch.

You are able to quickly learn complex domains such as molecular biology into clear steps that drive product development. Helping our users solve human and planetary health will only work if we bring together the best minds in fields like biology, machine learning, UX, and marketing. You're the ultimate integrator, getting diverse humans to do their best work together. You have an entrepreneurial spirit “do whatever it takes” to make our users happy.

**Responsibilities**

You are ultimately responsible for rapidly improving the user and business value our products generate. You conceive, define, design, development and launch new products and features.
- Define product strategy and roadmap by understanding user needs, and the potential (and limitations) of how protein-engineering and machine-learning can be applied
- Translate goals into detailed requirements, and work with the design and development teams to execute on the plans
- Manage all aspects of the product life cycle, from conception to launch, including identifying opportunities, defining product vision, and driving product development.
- Monitor product and model performance metrics to ensure product effectiveness and economic impact, making necessary adjustments to optimize performance
- Work with our research to identify and prioritize the highest impact improvements to our machine learning models, and help define machine-learning research topics
- Communicate product plans and performance to the rest of the team as well as users & clients

**Need to haves**
- You consistently performed in the top percentile of whatever environment you’ve been in, whether in business, education, sport, or any other dream you pursued.
- You want to rise faster than would be possible in any ‘normal’ career and you’re happy to roll up your sleeves and do whatever’s required.
- You have at least 5 years of experience in developing software products as a Product Manager
- You have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent technical field
- You have the ability to drive all elements of the product development lifecycle such as product vision, go-to-market strategy, requirements, and launch
- You have experience working with cross-functional (e.g. Engineering, UX/UI) teams
- You thrive in ambiguity, and worked in a high-growth and/or fast-changing environment before.
- You have the gravitas to work with senior leaders (eg. VP Research of a pharma company) and can either speak their language or have the ability to learn it fast.
- You have outstanding analytical skills, write inspiring documents, and are not afraid of getting in front of a crowd
- You get up to speed quickly and have the ability to learn about new domains (such as molecular biology) quickly

**Bonus points**
- You have a Master’s degree / PhD in Machine Learning or equivalent
- You have been in product management for developer or expert user focussed products
- You have experience building Natural Language Processing based software products
- You have experience in working with data science / machine lear+1ning research team