AI Product Manager (Forward-Deployed)

Lenkie is a fast-growing UK SME lender on a mission to give small businesses access to fair, fast, and flexible finance. We’re at an exciting inflection point — scaling our lending book and using AI across the business to power how we decide, operate and serve customers. This is a rare opportunity to shape how Lenkie adopts AI in production: working across the business to turn real operational problems into AI products that ship and make a measurable difference — and setting the template for how we use AI for years to come.

We’re looking for an AI Product Manager (Forward-Deployed) to own how we find, build and ship AI products across Lenkie. You’ll work closely with the CTO and embed with teams across Risk, Collections, Underwriting, Account Management and Operations — finding the problems worth solving, deciding what to build, and prototyping solutions yourself to prove they work before engineering scales them. This is a product-leaning, hands-on role. It isn’t about writing specs and waiting: you set direction and prioritise, and your AI skills let you validate ideas fast and cheaply. You’ll report directly to the CTO and help define how the whole business uses AI.

Key Responsibilities

• Embed with teams across Risk, Collections, Underwriting, Account Management and Operations to diagnose the real problems and decide which AI opportunities are worth building — prioritising by impact, not novelty.
• Own the AI product roadmap and requirements, keeping every initiative clearly specified and tied to company OKRs.
• Prototype hands-on with LLMs (prompting, RAG, agents, evaluation) to validate value quickly and de-risk before engineering commits.
• Partner closely with Engineering to take validated solutions to production, defining success metrics up front.
• Measure adoption and operational impact of everything shipped, and establish reusable patterns and responsible, compliant AI use.
• Translate business problems into AI solutions, and explain AI capabilities, trade-offs and results to non-technical stakeholders.

Qualifications/Required Skills

• 3–6 years of experience in product management or a closely related role, with a track record of shipping products that delivered measurable impact.
• Hands-on AI ability — you can build working prototypes with LLMs (prompting, RAG, agents, evaluation) and reason about feasibility, cost and how to evaluate quality.
• Strong working knowledge of modern AI stacks and how to apply them in production (e.g. Anthropic’s Claude), including how to evaluate and ship LLM-based solutions responsibly.
• Strong product judgement — prioritisation by impact, clear requirements, defining success metrics, and OKR discipline.
• Proficiency with data (SQL and analytics) to size problems and measure impact.
• Comfort working in small, fast-moving teams where you have to be both strategic and hands-on.
• A strong communicator, able to explain AI capabilities and model outputs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience in fintech, lending or another regulated environment is a strong plus.
• Python and/or TypeScript, and experience with workflow automation, is a plus.

How we reward performance

• Help set how a fast-growing lender adopts AI, with real ownership and influence.
• Competitive salary + meaningful equity.
• Hybrid working from our London office.
• A mission you can get behind - helping small businesses access the finance they deserve.

We’re building a diverse, inclusive and supportive team where everyone can do their best work. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, experiences and perspectives, and we do not discriminate based on age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, please let us know. If you would like to apply for this role please send a CV and any other relevant information you want to share to careers@lenkie.com.