Principal Product Mgr

Position: Principal Product Mgr I
Principal Product Manager I  Do you have 10+ years building and shipping complex AI or data-intensive products? Do you have a real passion for new ideas, techniques, and technologies? Join us and lead the future of AI-powered research at Leap Space!

Location:

UK
About our Team  We build Leap Space, an AI-assisted workspace where researchers find scientific literature they can trust and do their best thinking and work in one place. It incorporates Scopus, peer-reviewed full-text articles, and a growing set of other sources. We re an international team and we work from evidence. We support science to help improve the world.
About the Role  We re looking for a Principal Product Manager to own agentic retrieval and orchestration for Leap Space: the engine at the heart of the product. Every answer Leap Space gives runs through this engine, from planning the research approach to orchestrating the tools and models that turn a question into a referenced answer. The next generation will plan its own research more deeply and reason over more kinds of sources.

It will answer questions we cannot answer today. You will shape its direction and sequencing in partnership with the Senior Director of Product Management and Strategy, and carry those decisions across the teams that build it. That partnership will be close initially, with your ownership growing as delivery matures. This is the most technical product role on Leap Space. You will work with a dedicated team focused on shared GenAI capabilities, whose engineers and data scientists are drawn from multiple product squads and platform teams.

The engine also spans an AI orchestration platform team and production UI teams, so most significant decisions cross at least one team boundary, and several involve dependencies you will manage rather than own: platform prerequisites, data access, and legal and privacy review. We are looking for someone who can frame the problem and make the call, and who holds the sequence together when priorities shift.

The engine s next generation already exists as a working, validated prototype. A large part of this role is leading its staged migration into production. You will decide what ships in each increment, set the interim targets that reduce the size of each subsequent step, and keep the engineering backlog defined well ahead of the team s capacity. This is hands-on delivery leadership, carried out in refinement with engineers and data scientists, rather than programme oversight at a distance.

The engine is also a shared service. Other Leap Space squads build their agentic features on it, and part of the role is serving them well: gathering their requirements, recognising when several teams need the same capability, and consolidating that demand into shared platform work. You will also anticipate what the product roadmap will require of the system before the requirement arrives.

The engine is also how Leap Space grows. New tools and skills extend the product to new user tasks, often built in partnership with other Elsevier teams. You will own that expansion: which capabilities come next, for which users, and with which partners. You will report to the VP of Product Management and work closely, day to day, with the Senior Director of Product Management and Strategy for Leap Space.

We expect product managers to stay close to the technology: to understand how the AI behaves, how it is evaluated, and where the trade-offs lie. You will validate concepts by prototyping alongside engineers and data scientists, but the craft we hire for is product judgment. This field moves quickly, and we expect genuine curiosity about it. The right person follows new ideas, techniques, and technologies as they emerge, tests them independently through their own research, and brings informed opinions to decisions rather than waiting for the team to evaluate everything first.
Responsibilities  Own the product strategy, vision, and roadmap for agentic retrieval and orchestration. The near-term features are how that strategy shows up, not the strategy itself. Make the sequencing calls that span teams (what ships first, what waits on a dependency, what each answer costs) and carry them across the teams involved.
Lead the migration of new engine capabilities from prototype to production: stage the releases, set interim targets, lock versions and route further experiments to the next one.
Translate validated prototype behaviour into engineering-ready work: tickets with clear…