Technical Product Lead (LLM startup)

Competitive salary - London · Hybrid 1–2 days a week · Reporting to the CEO Most product roles ask you to influence. This one hands you the keys. Alteam is partnering with a VC-backed LLM research startup — a spinout from one of the world's top universities — to hire its first Product Lead. The founding team is a leading AI researcher and a serial entrepreneur: the science is genuinely deep, and it ships at startup pace. Their product analyses production agent workflows and gives enterprises the evidence to safely replace expensive LLM calls with cheaper ones. The buyers are technical. The problem is technical. The product decisions are technical. They're pre-product-market-fit and moving fast. You spend three months building context with the founders as final decision makers, then decision rights on roadmap, scope and priorities transfer to you. Clear path to Head of Product / CPO. What you decide is what gets built, and it lands with real enterprise customers within weeks. THE ROLE - Own the roadmap and be accountable for the outcomes, including the failures - Run your own customer discovery with technical buyers and turn it into testable hypotheses - Drive the cadence between Product, Science and Engineering — priorities clear, decisions made, work closed - Prototype fast, then ship validated ideas with Engineering - Report directly to the CEO YOUR PROFILE You hold your own in a review with research scientists. Concretely, that means: - You can open the trace of a failing multi-step agent and form your own hypothesis before you ask Engineering - You design the eval set yourself — and you know where LLM-as-judge quietly breaks down - You argue model routing, caching and distillation as cost levers, with numbers attached - You prototype in Python and ship a notebook that settles an argument REQUIREMENTS - 8+ years across product and engineering, with real 0→1 ownership — founding PM, early-stage product lead, ex-founder, or a technical consultant who owned what got built - 2–3 years hands-on with LLM agents in production: APIs, agentic systems, evaluation, traces, real failure modes - Comfortable taking ambiguous problems to evidence-backed decisions without needing consensus on every call - Enterprise AI deployment, evaluation or observability experience a strong plus THIS ROLE IS NOT FOR YOU IF - Your AI experience is mostly prompt engineering and demos - You need a spec written for you before you can start - You've owned roadmaps but never owned a technical trade-off - You want authority without accountability for the outcome SALARY & PERKS - £80,000 base salary - Generous stock option package (EMI) - 5 weeks paid holiday - Flexible schedule, hybrid 1–2 days a week in London HOW YOU WORK You listen before proposing solutions and change your mind when the evidence changes. You want real decision-making authority — and you're comfortable being accountable for the results. Interested? Get in touch and I'll walk you through who they are and what they're building. Yoann Demont