Product Manager

The way companies innovate is broken. The systems built to create and protect ideas can’t keep up with the pace of change. Today, 90% of S&P 500 company value is intangible (e.g., in intellectual property) - yet R&D and IP teams spend half their time buried in manual work, sifting through patents and paperwork instead of pushing the frontier forward. The tools of creating and protecting are stuck in the past. We’re here to fix that.

Ankar is building the R&D tools for the AI era and defining what applied research will look like in the next 20 years. We’re building infrastructure and product experiences our customers rely on every day. You’ll translate messy, ambiguous problems into clean, dependable software—and you’ll do it at the cutting‑edge of AI.

We’re at an inflection point: We’ve raised >$24M to date from Tier‑1 VCs like Atomico, Index Ventures, Norrsken, Daphni, and angels like the Founder of Hugging Face, CEO from Datadog, and Leaders from DeepMind and OpenAI. We’re already working with the world’s most innovative companies including Fortune 500 company L’Oréal and global law firm Vorys. Expanding our world‑class team with alumni from Palantir, Amazon, and BCG to tackle the $1T+ innovation market. We’re just getting started.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Build world‑class product.
• Translate messy problems into dependable software. Work from first principles to turn ambiguous requirements into clear, maintainable, production‑ready solutions.
• Ship fast and iterate constantly. Deliver quickly, learn from real feedback, and refine the product week by week with direct access to customers.
• Own the mission end‑to‑end. Take full ownership of new product work from design to implementation, release, feedback and iteration.
• Drive clarity, velocity, and long‑term quality. Establish patterns, improve feedback practices, and help shape product direction as Ankar’s mission evolves.
• Partner deeply with engineers and customers. Collaborate closely with engineering, design, and customer‑facing teams to ensure what we build is useful, usable, and impactful.

What Success Looks Like

• You ship meaningful product improvements weekly and build trust through consistent execution.
• You proactively identify what the product needs next, not just what’s assigned.
• You raise the bar for product quality and velocity through strong prioritization and decision‑making.
• You evolve your product strategy and execution plans to scale with users and the business over time.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience leading the end‑to‑end delivery of customer‑facing products.
• Experience owning projects independently, including problem discovery, scoping, execution, rollout, and iteration based on feedback and data.
• Strong analytical and systems thinking: ability to reason across design and engineering constraints, and strive for maintainable product solutions.
• Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders, driving alignment across teams.
• Strong product intuition and experience partnering closely with engineering and design to define user workflows and ship high‑quality experiences.
• Experience in fast‑moving startups or high‑ownership environments, with a bias toward action and measurable outcomes.

Culture at Ankar

• Contrarian - we think from first principles: We think deeply, question assumptions, and build from first principles. The best ideas come from clarity and rigour.
• Creative - we build with taste: We’re building the R&D tools for the AI era and shaping what applied research looks like over the next 20 years. We care about precision, quality, and systems that last.
• Competitiveness - we play to win: We move with urgency and set a very high bar for ourselves and each other. Every win raises the bar. Every challenge sharpens us.

What We Put Behind Our People

• Health Insurance: Full private health & dental coverage for you and your dependents.
• Pension: Flexible pension scheme with up to 5% employer matching on qualifying earnings.
• Food on us: Team lunches twice a week, plus dinner when working late in the office.
• Cycle to work: Green Commute initiative scheme (up to £3k) to help you get a new bike tax‑free.
• Way we work: We combine deep, in‑person collaboration (3 days/week in our Shoreditch office) with flexibility and trust. What matters is ownership, impact, and results, not where you work from.
• Visa sponsorship: Yes.