Director of Product & Technology in City of London

LUMYA Living is a pan-European multi-typology residential operator, PBSA, co-living, micro-living and serviced apartments, with an operating the Viridis portfolio of circa 2,274 beds across Cardiff, Leicester, Leipzig, Vienna and Graz, and a development pipeline spanning Porto, Dublin, Málaga, Edinburgh, Nuremberg, Berlin and Vienna II and 3rd party operations for other investors. LUMYA operates within the Viridis group, with Viridis Real Estate as institutional capital partner & property owner. LUMYA Living is the PMS’s first client and reference deployment, every prospective client will judge the platform against a live, working operator before trusting it with their own.

Role Purpose

The Director of Product & Technology Officer is the single senior product and technology voice for NVS, accountable to the Managing Director & Board for the venture's strategy, build, security, commercial delivery and financial performance. This is a business-leadership role as much as a technology one. The postholder effectively runs NVS day to day, product and engineering, platform security and compliance, client onboarding and support, go-to-market, budget and people, while the Managing Director retains strategic and governance oversight at Board level. They will take the venture from its current early-stage footing through the qualified pilot pipeline and into the first phase of external scale, converting prospective operators into paying, referenceable clients.

The role sits at the centre of the venture's defining strategic challenge: The PMS is being built and sold by a company that also operates purpose-built student accommodation, and prospective third-party clients are, in a number of cases, LUMYA Living's direct competitors. Earning their trust is not a matter of positioning, it depends on the architecture, accreditation, data governance and commercial discipline the postholder puts in place from day one. Every responsibility area below ultimately serves that single test.

Key Responsibility Areas

• Product & Technology Strategy
  • Own the PMS product roadmap and technical architecture across all modules, facilities management, CAFM, booking, housekeeping, tenancy management, rent collection & invoicing, marketplace and asset-manager dashboard Lifecycle Modelling BSA Golden Thread.
  • Set and defend build-vs-buy-vs-integrate decisions for critical connectors, including access control, payments, accounting, channel/CRM and IoT/utilities integrations.
  • Translate a genuinely multi-vertical requirement, Co-living, PBSA, Serviced Apartments and Asset Management, into one coherent platform rather than four disconnected products.
  • Act as the single technology and product voice to the Managing Director and Board, with direct accountability for roadmap credibility and delivery.
  • Own engineering velocity, code quality and technical debt as the business scales toward the Phase 3 target architecture.
• Platform, Data Protection & Security Compliance
  • Own the ISO 27001 and/or SOC 2 accreditation programme, the single certification most likely to unlock, or block, institutional-scale deals.
  • Own GDPR compliance for the platform, including the Data Protection Officer function (in-house or outsourced), data processing agreements, breach-notification protocols and cross-border transfer safeguards.
  • Design and defend the data-separation and IP-governance architecture between LUMYA Living (as client) and NVS (as vendor), the arm's-length discipline that directly answers the most important objection a competitor-operator buyer will raise.
  • Own the venture's security posture end to end: infrastructure security, vulnerability management, incident response and the annual audit cycle.
• Client Services & Commercial Delivery
  • Own client implementation and onboarding, configuration, data migration, training and go-live, for pilot and subsequent third-party clients.
  • Build and lead the support function (L1–L3 help desk) and its service levels, escalation paths and continuous improvement loop.
  • Own the client success and technical account management relationship, including renewal, adoption and expansion conversations.
  • Be personally accountable for converting the current pilot pipeline into live, satisfied, referenceable deployments that other prospective operators can be shown with confidence.
• Financial Performance & Commercial Strategy
  • Own the NVS budget and cost-to-serve economics, and be accountable for the cost-per-bed trajectory as beds-on-platform scale through each growth phase.
  • Work with the Managing Director and Commercial Director to resolve, then execute, the venture's pricing strategy, including the outstanding subscription-versus-marketplace decision.
  • Report ARR, gross margin, net revenue retention and unit economics as the standard commercial language of the business, the SaaS equivalent of the NOI and yield metrics that govern the wider LUMYA portfolio.
  • Own commercial contract terms for the PMS clients (with Commercial and Legal), including SLAs, escalators and renewal mechanics.
• Marketing & Go-to-Market
  • Own the PMS market positioning, sales collateral and case studies, using LUMYA Living's own deployment as the platform's proof point.
  • Build qualified pipeline beyond the current pilot operators, including a credible presence at relevant PropTech and PBSA industry events.
  • Partner with LUMYA Group's Corporate Marketing and Brand Communications function to keep external NVS materials consistent with wider group brand guidelines, while giving the PMS its own distinct, SaaS-credible identity.
  • Own the narrative that answers the competitor-trust question directly and confidently, rather than leaving prospective clients to resolve it themselves.
• People & Organisation Design
  • Build and lead the NVS team through the approved four-phase headcount model, scaling from the current founding team toward a circa 50-FTE organisation at full platform scale.
  • Recruit, structure and retain talent across Product & Design, Engineering, Platform/Data/Security and Client Services & Delivery.
  • Establish the culture, ways of working and performance framework appropriate to a stand-alone software business operating inside a real-estate-owned group, distinct from LUMYA Living's operational culture where it needs to be.
  • Line-manage the existing Product Manager, Senior Developer/Tech Lead and PMS Product Owner, and every subsequent NVS hire, directly or through their own leadership layer as the team grows.
• Governance, Stakeholder & Board Reporting
  • Represent NVS at Board and Managing Director level, with reporting quality and cadence consistent with the wider LUMYA/Viridis governance framework.
  • Engage constructively and transparently with the Managing Director & the virtual advisory board's strategic challenge process, bringing genuine decisions to it.
  • Own and keep current the venture's risk register, with particular ownership of the competitor-trust, IP-separation and security risk items.

Skills & Experience

Essential

• A proven track record leading product and/or engineering functions in a B2B SaaS business, including at least one experience of taking a platform from early-stage/pilot through to a scaled, multi-tenant product.
• Direct experience achieving ISO 27001 and/or SOC 2 certification as a commercial enabler for enterprise sales, not solely as a compliance exercise.
• Sound working knowledge of GDPR, data processing agreements and data governance in a multi-tenant B2B software context.
• Experience owning a P&L or business-unit budget, and fluent in SaaS unit economics (ARR, gross margin, CAC, net revenue retention).
• Experience building and scaling a product, engineering or client-services organisation, ideally from single-figure headcount toward 40+ FTE.
• Comfortable operating as the most senior technology and product executive reporting directly to a Managing Director, including Board-level reporting and challenge.
• A credible, confident communicator, able to represent a young software business to sceptical, senior, commercially sophisticated prospective clients.