Head of Product

Job description About Applied Computing Applied Computing was founded in 2024 to build Orbital, a physics-informed foundation model for energy operations. We came out of stealth less than a year ago and have seen exceptional early traction: live deployments across oil and gas, refineries, and petrochemicals, strategic investment from industry leaders, and validation from some of the world’s most demanding operators. The hydrocarbon industry keeps the world running. But its complexity has left operators tied to legacy systems, making critical decisions on less than 10% of available data. We built Orbital to change that. It is a foundation model built specifically for energy that lets companies use AI at scale, harnessing all of their operational data and optimising in real time for any metric. Decisions get faster, operations get safer, and carbon intensity falls. We have raised over $40 million, including one of the largest seed rounds for an AI company in the UK. We are 32 people, flat structure, high autonomy. We’re just getting started. The Role Orbital is a technically groundbreaking product deployed in some of the most complex industrial environments on the planet. The science is proven and the results are real. What we need now is someone who can make it exceptional to use. As Head of Product, you will own the end-to-end product experience: what we build, how it behaves, how operators interact with it day-to-day, and how we evolve it as we scale. You will work directly with our CAIO and engineering leadership to turn deep technical capability into software that people genuinely love using. You do not need to arrive knowing the difference between a CCR unit and a hydrocracker. We will teach you the domain. What you must bring is relentless product craft: an obsession with usability, a sharp instinct for what matters to the person in front of the screen, and the discipline to ship things that work rather than things that look good on a roadmap. This role is for someone who has already built products that people did not just use, they preferred. Who has made complex workflows feel simple. Who gets frustrated when good technology is buried under bad UX. Who understands that adoption is a product problem, not a training problem. The Person You are a product obsessive. Not a roadmap manager, not a process owner. Someone who genuinely cares whether the interface in front of an operator at 3am in a refinery control room is clear, fast, and trustworthy. You read user behaviour, not just user feedback. You know that what people say they want and what they actually need are often different things, and you have the tools and instincts to close that gap. You can hold a rigorous conversation with a PhD-level Ai Researcher about model behaviour and then walk out and translate that into a product decision a plant operator will understand. You are comfortable being the bridge. You move quickly, make decisions with incomplete information, and change your mind when the evidence demands it. You do not wait for consensus. You build things, watch what happens, and improve them. What This Role Is Not - A project management role. You are not here to run sprints, manage Jira boards, or chase engineers for status updates. - A customer success role. You care about customers, but your job is to build the product, not to manage the relationship. - A design role. You will have opinions on UX and you will need to guide design quality, but you are not the designer. - A committee. You will consult widely but you will decide. If every product decision requires five sign-offs, you are doing it wrong. - A domain expert role. We are not hiring someone who already knows energy. We are hiring someone who already knows product. Job requirements Essential Experience - Demonstrable track record of shipping software products that users consistently praised for ease of use and clarity. - Experience working on complex B2B or enterprise software with technically sophisticated end users (engineers, analysts, operators, or equivalent). - Able to read and act on product usage data. You have built and used dashboards, funnels, and behavioural analytics to make product decisions. - Experience working directly with ML or AI engineering teams, and a working understanding of how model-driven products behave differently from rule-based ones. - Comfortable representing the product to customers, prospects, and investors. You can demo the product, explain the roadmap, and handle hard questions without preparation. - Minimum five years in a product role, with at least two in a senior or lead position owning a full product area. Nice to Haves - Exposure to industrial, operational technology, or engineering software products. - Experience building products that run in constrained or specialist environments (edge, embedded, or regulated). - Background working in or with energy, utilities, manufacturing, or process industries. - Familiarity with data-heavy interfaces: time series visualisation, Job responsibilities Key Responsibilities 1. Product Strategy and Roadmap -Own the Orbital product roadmap from strategy through to delivery, working closely with our CAIO and engineering leads. -Define and prioritise what we build next based on customer usage, deployment feedback, and commercial opportunity. -Translate operator workflows and energy industry problems into concrete product decisions without needing those problems explained twice. -Make the hard calls on what we do not build, as ruthlessly as the calls on what we do. 2. User Experience and Usability - Own the end-to-end user experience across Orbital: dashboards, alerts, investigation workflows, configuration, and reporting. - Establish and enforce usability standards. If something takes too many clicks, too much training, or too much explanation, it is not finished. - Build a feedback loop with operators and engineers in the field. Fly out to customer sites. Sit in control rooms. Watch people use the product. - Work with design and engineering to produce interfaces that feel fast, clear, and reliable in high-stakes industrial environments. 3. Discovery and Customer Insight - Run structured discovery with existing customers and prospects to identify product gaps, friction points, and expansion opportunities. - Synthesise usage data, customer calls, and field observations into clear product direction. - Partner with forward deployed engineers and delivery teams to capture what is working and what is not, in production. - Feed commercial intelligence back into product decisions: what is blocking sales, what is driving expansion, what is causing churn. 4. Delivery Partnership - Work with engineering to define clear acceptance criteria, scope boundaries, and launch standards. - Maintain a relentless focus on shipping. A perfect spec that ships late is not better than a good spec that ships now. - Own the product launch process: internal alignment, customer communication, documentation, and adoption tracking. - Measure what you ship. Track feature adoption, workflow completion, time-to-value, and usage depth. If you built it and nobody used it, that matters. 5. Platform Thinking - Orbital runs across cloud, edge, and partner-native environments including Databricks and AWS. Product decisions must account for deployment context. - As we expand into new industry verticals and use cases, help define how the product scales: what is core, what is configurable, what is bespoke. - Contribute to product positioning and packaging decisions alongside commercial leadership. Job benefits Benefits - Competitive salary benchmarked at the 90th percentile for the role, level, and location. - Meaningful equity. We are pre-Series A and growing fast. - 28 days holiday including bank holidays. - Private health insurance. - Remote-first with a London hub for collaboration. - Direct access to the founding team and a front-row seat to building one of the most technically ambitious AI companies in Europe.