Product Manager – Government Missions

About Windward

Windward is the leading Maritime AI™ company, fusing large scale multi-source data and GenAI to empower global leaders with mission-grade intelligence. We help organizations anticipate threats and make high-stakes decisions with confidence.

Product at Windward

We hire product managers that lean in and can own a domain. You get a problem space and a team, and you're expected to have a point of view, make the calls that are yours to make, and bring a recommendation on the ones that aren't.

Product at Windward runs two kinds of work. Customer-facing — the app, agentic investigations, mission workflows — where you're close to analysts, investigators and government operators. Data and research — pipelines, extracting intelligence from raw sources, running model research — where the craft is in the accuracy and coverage of what comes out.

We hire people who can do both. Most PMs here move between them, and the strongest ones ask to. We're not looking for someone with the exact right résumé. We're looking for horsepower, judgment, and the ability to make complicated things simple.

How We Work

We move fast, ship continuously, and care more about outcomes than titles or hand-waving. If you have a bias for action, enjoy being hands-on, and naturally prioritize value, this is the team for you.

About the Role

You will own our government missions: the work navies, coast guards, border and law enforcement agencies and defence intelligence bodies actually do, from maritime domain awareness and interdiction to sanctions enforcement and counter-narcotics. Those customers have a maritime picture, risk models and investigation tools today, and where we are going is a platform where a mission is configured rather than custom-built, so that a coast guard's triage workflow and an intelligence agency's tasking workflow are one product with different mission templates. What makes this domain hard is that government deployments constrain everything above them: air-gapped and on-premise tenants, classification and handling markings on every artifact, sensor entitlements that differ per customer and per contract, and integration into systems the customer already runs rather than ours. You will be the person who knows what a watch officer does at 03:00, what a tender actually requires, and which of the two the roadmap should answer first. The missions are yours commercially as well as technically, with revenue attached to them.

 

What You'll Do

• Own a product area with revenue attached and customers who depend on it.

• Work on things that matter. Interdiction, mission planning, investigations — our products sit inside decisions with real global consequences.

• Lead your own team of engineers. A dedicated team building your domain with you. You're not their manager — you set what gets built and why, and you're in the architecture conversation rather than briefed after it.

• Sit with operators, not only buyers. In government the person who signs and the person who uses are rarely the same, and the second one is who you design for. You will spend time on watch floors and at exercises, and bring back what neither the tender nor the account team told us.

• Challenge, get challenged. We move between different kinds of hard, but we do it together. New research areas, novel world problems, new types of intelligence sources.

• Present your own work. Small product org, no layers. You're in front of the exec team, sales team, and marketing team. Nobody translates you.

• Build, don't just describe. AI for research, specs, prototypes, analysis. Better a rough working version than a doc about one.

• Join a team that's pretty fun, kinda smart, and a little stupid. We love working together, care about good work and good vibes in equal measure, are genuinely obsessed with solving hard problems, and want you to succeed here.

Who You Are

Everything below is required. The last two are specific to this role, and they do not substitute for the ones above them.

• 2–10+ years in product. We care about trajectory more than years — we've hired PMs early in their careers and PMs with more than a decade behind them, and we set title and comp to the person, not the req.

• You have built for governments before. You have shipped product to defence, navy, coast guard, border or law enforcement customers, and you know how that work differs from commercial: the evaluation that is really a procurement, the accreditation, the deployment you cannot reach remotely, the integration into a system of record you do not control, and the user who did not choose their own tools. You can tell a requirement that came from an operator from one that came from a tender, and you handle each differently.

• Maritime or intelligence depth. You come from maritime, naval or intelligence work, whether in uniform, inside an agency, or building for them. You already know what a maritime picture is for, so you will not spend your first six months learning why a gap in a vessel's transmission matters or what an analyst does with one.

• Fast on complex things. You pick up an unfamiliar, technical, high-stakes domain quickly and get to real understanding, not vocabulary. This is the single thing we screen hardest for.

• A clarifier. You make complicated things simple — in a decision, a requirement, a slide, a Slack message. You naturally produce focused written outputs that tell a story, rather than pages-long docs of AI slop.

• High agency. You see something broken and fix it without being asked. You start things. You don't wait for permission, cover, or a perfectly defined scope. Founders and 0-to-1 builders tend to do well here.

• Someone people are calm handing work to. Organized, dependable, follows through, doesn't drop things. Nobody needs to check your work or chase you for it.

• Technical. Whether or not you've been an engineer. You're comfortable with system design, data, APIs and models, and you can hold your own in an engineering conversation.

• Great taste, and you own the quality. Real instincts about what makes a product feel good to use. You obsess over details, from the UX to the logic, with customer empathy.

• AI-native. You use AI daily and well, you follow where it's going, and you have opinions about it.

• A strong presenter and writer, in English, to any audience — engineers, executives, customers, governments.

Advantage

• You've founded a company, or were among the first employees at one.

• Service as an analyst, watch officer or operator in a naval, coast guard or intelligence unit.

• You have worked inside a government customer's own system of record, or delivered into one.

• Experience with trade or sanctions compliance.