AI Product Manager (Forward-Deployed)

Lenkie is a fast-growing UK SME lender on a mission to give small businesses access to fair, fast, and flexible finance. We’re at an exciting inflection point — scaling our lending book and using AI across the business to power how we decide, operate and serve customers.

This is a rare opportunity to shape how Lenkie adopts AI in production: working across the business to turn real operational problems into AI products that ship and make a measurable difference — and setting the template for how we use AI for years to come.

About the job

We are looking for a highly technical AI Product Manager who can operate at the intersection of product, engineering and business operations.

You will embed with teams across Risk, Collections, Underwriting, Account Management and Operations to identify high-value problems, decide which opportunities are worth pursuing and build working AI prototypes yourself before partnering with Engineering to scale them into production.

This is approximately a 60% product and 40% technical role. You will own product direction and prioritisation, but you must also be capable of building and evaluating credible AI applications independently.

The ideal candidate will have a strong technical foundation, potentially as a software engineer, data scientist, technical founder or product engineer, and will have transitioned into a product-focused role within an AI-first or highly technical environment.

At Lenkie, you will not simply write requirements and manage a backlog. You will be expected to understand workflows deeply, work directly with code, APIs and data, and prove that a solution works before significant engineering resources are committed.

Key Responsibilities

• AI Product Discovery: Embed with teams across Risk, Collections, Underwriting, Account Management and Operations to understand their workflows, diagnose problems and identify where AI can create meaningful value.
• Roadmap Ownership: Own and prioritise the AI product roadmap, ensuring every initiative is tied to measurable company objectives, customer outcomes or operational improvements.
• Hands-On Prototyping: Build working prototypes using LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, agents, structured outputs, tool use and workflow automation.
• Technical Validation: Test the feasibility, quality, reliability, cost and operational value of potential solutions before committing significant engineering resources.
• Product Delivery: Work closely with Engineering to turn validated prototypes into secure, reliable and scalable production products.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Use SQL and analytics to investigate problems, size opportunities, validate assumptions and measure the impact of products after launch.
• Adoption & Impact: Own adoption after deployment and ensure products become embedded within real workflows and produce measurable business outcomes.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Translate complex business problems into technical solutions and communicate AI capabilities, limitations and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Qualifications/Required Skills

• Experience: 3–6 years of experience across product management, software engineering, product engineering, forward-deployed engineering or a closely related role.
• Technical Foundation: You have previously worked in a hands-on technical role and are comfortable building software independently.
• Programming Ability: Strong proficiency in Python or TypeScript. You should be able to build an end-to-end prototype without relying entirely on an engineering team.
• Hands-On AI Experience: Practical experience building applications with LLMs, including prompting, structured outputs, tool calling, RAG, agents and evaluation.
• Evidence of Building: A track record of personally building and shipping working software products, AI applications, internal tools or production-quality prototypes.
• Technical Fluency: Strong understanding of APIs, webhooks, databases, authentication, asynchronous workflows and modern software architecture.
• Product Judgement: Strong ability to prioritise based on impact, define clear requirements, set success metrics and distinguish between genuine product opportunities and interesting technical experiments.
• Data Proficiency: Strong SQL and analytics skills, with the ability to investigate problems and measure impact independently.
• Commercial Thinking: Ability to connect technical work to revenue, customer experience, operational efficiency or risk reduction.
• Self-Starter Mentality: You thrive in an environment where not everything is defined. You investigate problems, build solutions and take ownership from discovery through deployment.
• Communication: Ability to explain technical concepts, AI outputs and model limitations clearly to non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Previous experience as a software engineer who transitioned into product management.
• Experience working within an AI-first company or a dedicated AI product team.
• Experience as a technical founder, product engineer, forward-deployed engineer or solutions engineer.
• Experience in fintech, lending, payments or another regulated industry.
• Experience building internal tools for underwriting, risk, operations, compliance or customer support.
• Experience with Anthropic Claude, OpenAI models or other foundation model platforms.
• Experience with AI observability, tracing and evaluation tools.
• Experience with workflow automation tools such as n8n, Temporal or similar platforms.
• Familiarity with AWS and cloud-based production environments.

How we reward performance

• Competitive Salary: Generous base salary plus meaningful equity options.
• Hybrid Culture: Three days per week in our London office to foster collaboration, with flexibility for the rest.
• Impact: The opportunity to define how a fast-growing lender adopts AI across its products and operations.
• Autonomy: Significant ownership over which problems we solve and how solutions are designed, validated and delivered.
• Technical Environment: Work closely with the CTO and a highly technical engineering team on complex financial and operational problems.
• Growth: A clear path towards senior product, AI product leadership or broader product and technology roles as the company scales.

We’re building a diverse, inclusive and supportive team where everyone can do their best work. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, experiences and perspectives, and we do not discriminate based on age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, please let us know.

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