Director of product management

About nTop

nTop builds parametric design software for the hardest geometry problems in aerospace, defense, and industrial turbomachinery. Our platform lets engineers define a design as a parametric program — a model that represents not one aircraft or turbine, but every variant of it that a program might need to consider. Customers use nTop to compress the journey from requirements to fielded systems, replacing years of iterative hand-modeling with systematic exploration across design spaces that were previously too large to search. Our product platform spans implicit modeling — a way of representing geometry so it can flex and update across thousands of design variants — GPU-accelerated physics simulation, optimization, and distributed computing. nTop provides a "batteries-included" end-to-end workflow from requirements to finished product, and also integrates with industry-standard CAD, CAE, PLM, and AI tools engineers already rely on.

The Role

This role reports to the CTO and leads a team of five: three Product Managers — for Modeling, Simulation & Optimization, and Distributed Computing — plus nTop's two-person UX design and research team. It's a foundational leadership seat: this person sets the operating cadence for three technical PM teams and owns the product point of view that ties their work together.

What You'll Do

• Turn vision into a working system. Translate nTop's 2–5 year direction into concrete objectives, a resourcing plan, and a cadence the three teams follow.
• Coach product management as a craft, in the room. Sit directly in roadmap and tradeoff decisions with your three PMs, so their technical depth turns into product calls the business can act on.
• Set the criteria for when nTop builds, partners, or leaves a capability to the broader ecosystem — including how nTop positions its core geometry engine relative to the fast-growing physics-AI ecosystem.
• Own the seams between teams — the handoffs where geometry becomes a simulation mesh, where simulation results train faster surrogate models, and where both feed into the UX — plus the metrics that show whether the three teams are reinforcing each other.
• Meet with customers and stay connected to the broader industry to pressure-test direction against how design teams actually work, in a domain where mistakes are costly and hard to undo.
• Manage the UX design and research team directly.
• Represent Product Platform on nTop's leadership team and help set company strategy.

What We're Looking For

Must-haves

• 8–10+ years in product management, several of them spent coaching or managing other PMs directly — in the room for real prioritization and tradeoff calls, not just reviewing their output after the fact
• A track record of turning a leadership-defined, multi-year vision into concrete objectives and a working system a team can execute against — you'll operationalize the direction nTop's CTO sets, while owning real strategic calls within it, such as where nTop builds versus partners
• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related field — or, without the degree, hands-on experience running CFD simulations, working in CAD/PLM systems, or building simulation-driven engineering workflows deep enough to hold your own in a technical design review
• Experience managing managers or leading a product organization spanning multiple teams, including managing or closely partnering with a UX design and research function
• Demonstrated use of data and structured frameworks to guide build-vs-partner investment decisions
• Strong communication across technical and executive audiences

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in aerospace, maritime, propulsion, industrial energy, or motorsports, ideally paired with exposure to usage-based or concurrent licensing models
• Advanced degree (MS/PhD) in a relevant engineering discipline, or an MBA