Product Manager, Decision Optimisation

Deciding what to fund, defer, descope or cancel is one of the hardest calls a public body makes. We are building the AI product that makes it defensible, and it needs an owner.

Product Manager, Decision Optimisation. Scoped up to Principal Product Manager depending on experience. Up to £90,000. Fully remote across GB, or hybrid from Belfast. Four-day working weeks in July, August and December.

ABOUT WHITESPACE

Whitespace is an AI company for Defence, Government and Regulated Industries. Our sovereign AI operating system, Collective, connects governed data, domain context, reasoning and action with full auditability, across cloud, edge, on-premise and fully air-gapped environments.

THE ROLE

Decision Optimisation is our Balance of Investment product line, built on Collective. Balance of Investment is the discipline of choosing well between competing options inside hard constraints: fund a new programme, or defer, descope or cancel an existing one, against a fixed budget and a set of objectives that all have to be satisfied. Public bodies make these calls under parliamentary and audit scrutiny. Objective-led optimisation tests far more combinations against those objectives and constraints than any human process can.

We have a working MVP on Collective, a growing pipeline of Balance of Investment use cases across Defence and Government, and a roadmap that needs an owner. Reporting to the Head of Product and Design, you will pick it up and take it forward.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

• The roadmap. Sequencing the use case pipeline against customer demand, commercial opportunity and platform readiness.
• The MVP-to-scale call. What generalises into the product, and what stays bespoke.
• The product boundary. Which problems belong in Decision Optimisation and which belong elsewhere in the portfolio, and holding that line.
• The domain. Balance of Investment, P3M practice, business cases, approvals pathways and financial planning cycles, translated into the definitions Collective needs: decision context, scoring, and the constraints and objectives the optimisation runs against. Our AI data science team supports you on this.
• The trust properties. Confidence and uncertainty surfaced rather than hidden, recommendations traceable to their evidence, and an auditable record still legible years after the decision was taken.
• Business outcomes. Viability, problem framing, prioritised ROI, OKRs and adoption, as part of the product leadership triad with design and engineering.

You will work directly with senior public sector and regulated industry decision-makers, analysts and the finance and scrutiny communities, and internally with our C‑Suite, Head of Defence, Head of Engineering, Solutions Engineers and the Collective platform team. Travel to customer sites, including Defence establishments, as required.

We champion decision-led design. Every output should surface a question, an option or an action.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

• A track record shipping complex, data-heavy B2B or B2G products into live production. For Principal, ownership of a product line and its commercial outcomes.
• Experience taking an early-stage product past MVP: sequencing a pipeline of candidate use cases and deciding what generalises.
• AI fluency across agentic systems, natural language interfaces and knowledge graphs. Realistic about non-deterministic behaviour and deliberate about how trust is built into it.
• Enough technical depth to translate engineering and user needs into requirements that hold up under scrutiny.
• The range to articulate vision and strategy across the organisation, and to hold your own with senior defence and government stakeholders.
• Eligibility to obtain UK Security Clearance (SC), or active SC.

NICE TO HAVE

• Decision-support or optimisation products: constrained optimisation, scenario modelling, scoring, confidence and uncertainty. Products whose output is a recommendation, where you owned the correctness and defensibility of what the product asserted.
• Balance of Investment, portfolio prioritisation, capital allocation, P3M or approvals processes in defence, government or another highly regulated sector. A significant advantage.

WHAT WE OFFER

• Up to £90,000 depending on experience, scoped up to Principal Product Manager.
• Four-day working weeks in July, August and December.
• The last Friday of every other month off, January to June and September to November.
• A 3pm finish on every Friday you do work.
• 25 days of annual leave plus all bank holidays. In total, roughly 30 days of additional time back on top of your standard leave.
• Pension, opt-in private medical insurance, salary sacrifice EV scheme, death in service.
• Fully remote for GB-based employees with monthly travel to Belfast, or hybrid for NI-based employees, typically two days a week in Belfast.
• A say in product direction across Collective and the wider portfolio, at an NI-based scale-up.

Whitespace is committed to creating an inclusive, supportive environment for all team members. We welcome candidates from diverse backgrounds and experiences.

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