Focal Systems
Senior Product Manager
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Type: Full-time, salaried employment
Location: Remote, United Kingdom only.
Salary Range: £90,000 - £105,000 + stock options.
Who We Are
Focal Systems is the industry leader in retail AI solutions. We are headquartered in San Francisco, California with operations in Canada and the UK, and a tech-hub in Poland. We are a Deep Learning first company. Our mission is to automate and optimize brick and mortar retail using deep learning computer vision. Focal Systems has been deployed at scale with some of the top retailers in the world.
We seek smart, creative and passionate people who want to help build a great and enduring company and deploy Deep Learning to the world!
What You Will Be Responsible For
As Senior Product Manager, you will take ownership of how data is processed at Focal, and shape what that path becomes: from the imports that bring a retailer's planograms, inventory and store metadata into our platform, through the pipelines that turn them into signal, to the metrics and reports their head office acts on. You will work with data engineering, data scientists, analytics, customer success and the retailers themselves. What you build are data products, and the measure of one is what a retailer does differently because of it.
This is a hands-on role. You will set direction and priorities as we roll out to hundreds of new stores, but you are also expected to know the systems well enough to be a partner in an engineering design conversation, pull your own numbers when something looks wrong, and hold a strong position in the discussions with customers.
What We Are Looking For
- You are a peer to the engineers you work with, someone who understands the systems well enough to know what is expensive and why and when to push back
- You are drawn to the seams between teams, where ownership is shared and the hardest problems live
- You write your own queries and interrogate the answers before anyone else has to, and you can name the business number a data product of yours moved
- You can change your mind in a technical argument, and you can point to the time you did
- You have strong judgment about what not to build, and you have killed your own work when it stopped earning its place
- You use AI as part of how you actually work, and you have built things with it that other people went on to use, not demos you gave once
- You communicate complicated things crisply to people who do not share your context, including customers hearing an answer they did not want
- You build things that outlast you, whether runbooks, tooling or documented decisions, because you would rather remove yourself as a dependency than be indispensable
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What You Will Do
- Own product direction for the full data path, from how a retailer's data arrives to what our reports say, and set the priorities where the two ends pull against each other
- Own how customer data gets into Focal: imports, planograms, store metadata, cut-off configuration, and the chain-specific flows each retailer needs
- Own what comes out and whether anyone acts on it: the metrics, the reporting APIs, the insight-generating agents, and the customer-facing dashboards a head office runs its week on
- Run discovery with retailers and store colleagues, and turn what you learn into a product
- Ship, then find out whether anyone used it, and act on the answer
- Automate your own work with AI and share what you build with the rest of the product team
What You Need to Be Successful
- 5+ years in product management, including real time on a technically deep product where you owned integrations, data, or both
- Enough technical depth to reason about APIs, data pipelines and system boundaries, and to be an equal partner in an engineering discussion
- Experience building for a hierarchy of users who need different things from the same data: a store manager, a regional director and a head of supply chain reading one dataset three ways, served by one configurable surface
- Hands-on comfort with SQL and the ability to answer your own data questions
- Fluency in the analytics and BI tooling landscape, and a view on what makes a dashboard worth returning to rather than merely correct
- Demonstrated ownership of a product roadmap end to end, from problem definition through to something shipped and adopted
- A track record of getting things done across teams, and the communication to influence engineering and commercial partners
- Experience working directly with enterprise customers, including holding a position they disagree with
- Comfortable operating remote-first, across a distributed team
- Willingness to travel occasionally for store and customer visits
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What Would Set You Apart
- Experience in working with high-volume, noisy sensor or computer-vision data
- Experience with change data capture into a cloud warehouse (ideally Snowflake)
- Experience shipping AI-powered features, including the call on when a model is good enough to ship
Why Focal Systems
Joining Focal Systems means becoming part of a company that's truly making a difference in the retail world. Here's why you should consider us:
- Strong Values and Mission: We are a tightly-knit team with an ambitious mission and a strong set of core values, which define our approach to business and have successfully guided us since inception.
- Exceptional Team: We are a team of hard-working, fun-loving professionals from some of the most eminent universities, research labs, and tech companies of our time. We pride ourselves on recruiting exceptional individuals to help us redefine the state-of-the-art.
- Outstanding Partners: We work with 10+ of the largest retailers in the world and have a world-class roster of investors, advisors and partners to support & advise us in our endeavours.
What we offer
We care deeply about the health, happiness, and wellbeing of all of our employees. We offer:
- Competitive Salary & Attractive Stock
- Generous Paid Time Off
- Pension
- Sick Leave
- Parental Leave
- Learning and Development Budget
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