Senior Product Manager, Inference

Job Application for Senior Product Manager, Inference at Lightning AI

Senior Product Manager, Inference New York, New York, United States; San Francisco, California, United States

Who We Are

Lightning AI is the company behind PyTorch Lightning. Founded in 2019, we build an end-to-end platform for developing, training, and deploying AI systems—designed to take ideas from research to production with less friction.

Through our merger with Voltage Park, a neocloud and AI Factory, Lightning AI combines developer-first software with cost-efficient, large-scale compute. Teams get the tools they need for experimentation, training, and production inference, with security, observability, and control built in.

We serve solo researchers, startups, and large enterprises. Lightning AI operates globally with offices in New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and London, and is backed by Coatue, Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and Firstminute.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for a Founding Product Manager for Inference who will own this product end-to-end—roadmap, pricing, and GTM—from the ground up. This is a zero-to-one role at the intersection of deep technical fluency and commercial instinct. You'll define what we build and why, design the developer journey from first API call to production workload, and be the product voice in sales cycles and the market.

The right candidate has lived inside the machine; they've operated model serving infrastructure or shipped products on top of it, and can move fluidly between a latency/throughput tradeoff conversation with an infra engineer and a positioning conversation with a sales lead. You will be joining the Product Team and report to our VP of Product working directly with our executive team as we grow this business.

This is a hybrid role based in our New York City or San Francisco office with in-office requirements of 2 days per week.

What You’ll Do

Define Lightning AI's inference product vision and roadmap — what we build, what we don't, and in what order — translating the competitive landscape (vLLM, Together, Fireworks, Modal, hyperscaler inference APIs) into a differentiated strategy grounded in Lightning's compute and software advantage

Own inference pricing and packaging end-to-end: design the model (per-token, per-second, reserved capacity), run pricing experiments with Growth and Finance, and define the tiers that convert self-serve developers into enterprise contracts

Be the product voice in GTM: develop sales positioning, answer technical objections in the field, and partner with Marketing on the benchmarks, reference architectures, and developer content that builds credibility with ML engineers and platform teams

Own the developer journey from API key to production-scale deployment — identify and remove friction across onboarding, documentation, SDK ergonomics, and dashboard observability

Lead experiments across activation flows, pricing pages, and upgrade prompts; track and move DAU/MAU, Time to Value, Activation %, PQLs, and expansion revenue

Partner with engineering to write tight specs and make fast build/buy/partner decisions; collaborate across Product to ensure inference coheres with training, fine-tuning, and storage surfaces

Establish inference-specific metrics — throughput, latency SLAs, cold-start behavior, cost per token — and build the instrumentation to track them

What You’ll Need

7+ years of product management experience, with at least 3 years in infrastructure, platform, or developer tooling products

Direct, hands-on experience with model serving or inference infrastructure — you've shipped in this space; you understand quantization, batching strategies, KV cache, and speculative decoding at a level that lets you go deep with ML engineers

Proven track record owning product pricing and packaging decisions, not just feature decisions — you've modeled unit economics and made calls that affected margin

Experience with a PLG or trial-to-paid motion in a developer product; you know how to build self-serve growth loops and run rigorous A/B experiments

Strong analytical skills — comfortable with product instrumentation, metrics, and dashboards; you pull your own data

Excellent written and verbal communication; you can write a crisp one-pager, a technical spec, and a customer-facing benchmark brief with equal fluency

Bias for action and comfort operating with high ambiguity in a fast-moving environment

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field (or equivalent practical experience)

Bonus: Prior experience at a neocloud, hyperscaler inference team, or AI infrastructure startup; familiarity with the PyTorch/Lightning ecosystem; background in GPU cluster products or consumption-based infrastructure pricing

Compensation

We are committed to offering competitive compensation that reflects the value each team member brings to our mission. Final offers are based on factors such as experience, skills, geographic location, and role expectations. In addition to base salary, our total rewards package for eligible roles includes a discretionary bonus, a meaningful equity component, and comprehensive benefits.

The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is: $160,000 - $275,000 USD

Benefits and Perks

We offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits package designed to support our employees’ health, well-being, and long-term success. Benefits may vary by location, team, and role.

Benefits include:

Comprehensive medical, dental and vision coverage (U.S.); Private medical and dental insurance (U.K.)

Retirement and financial wellness support (U.S.); Pension contribution (U.K.)

Generous paid time off, plus holidays

Paid parental leave

Professional development support

Wellness and work-from-home stipends

Flexible work environment

At Lightning AI, we are committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace. We believe that diverse teams drive innovation and create better products. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. We are dedicated to building a culture where everyone can thrive and contribute to their fullest potential.

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