Full-Time

Senior Product Manager

Institute of Foundation Models

Institute of Foundation Models

Researches and develops foundation models

Compensation Overview

$150k - $350k/yr

+ Bonus

Sunnyvale, CA, USA

In Person

Bachelor's, MBA

Category
Product
Required Skills
LLM
Product Management
REST APIs

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Requirements
  • A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, or a related technical field. (MBA or advanced technical degree is a plus, but shipping record matters more).
  • 7+ years of relevant industry experience, with at least 3 years in Product Management for technical, backend, or platform products.
  • A portfolio of complex technical products you have successfully launched from 0 to 1.
  • Demonstrated ability to take a piece of complex technology and find its product-market fit with data or informed intuition.
  • Experience mentoring junior Product Managers or leading cross-functional initiatives; readiness to build and lead a team.
  • Technical fluency; you do not need to write code, but understand the stack and can discuss topics like context windows, inference latency, and specific benchmarks with researchers.
Responsibilities
  • Define the product vision and strategy for model families (LLMs, reasoning, world models) in collaboration with Lab Leadership.
  • Define the North Star and synthesize research tracks into a cohesive lab-wide Product Strategy; ensure model families tell a unified story.
  • Create user-centric roadmaps and define personas for academic researchers, open-source hackers, and enterprise CTOs; ensure roadmaps solve real problems.
  • Treat the model as a platform by defining requirements for model capabilities, serving endpoints, APIs, and demo applications for Day 1 usability and impact.
  • Drive shipping by converting research timelines into committed product timelines; manage tension between research exploration and shipping deadlines.
  • Bridge the gap between Research, Data, and Engineering; translate constraints into clear trade-off decisions.
  • Force-rank priorities to focus on critical paths to release; own release criteria and benchmarks for performance and safety for public release.
  • Coordinate cross-functional collaboration to synchronize Research, Engineering, Marketing, and Production to avoid silos and align timelines.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience with Foundation Models, including LLMs, Generative AI, or ML Infrastructure.
  • Experience in managing the transition of research artifacts into production-grade assets in a research or R&D environment.
  • Familiarity with the open-source AI ecosystem (Hugging Face, vLLM) and experience managing open-source community releases.
  • Prior experience directly managing Product Managers.
Institute of Foundation Models

Institute of Foundation Models

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IFM builds and studies foundation models—large AI models designed to learn broadly from diverse data and be used across many tasks. Its work centers on academic research to create open, fast, and practical models that address real-world societal needs, rather than narrow applications. The models are developed by a global team across Abu Dhabi, Paris, and Silicon Valley, with a strong emphasis on openness and collaboration to advance AI science and accessibility. Unlike typical private labs that lock models behind paywalls, IFM aims to provide publicly accessible, efficient models that can be used by researchers and developers to solve real problems. The overarching goal is to push the science of foundation models forward while ensuring their benefits reach society at large.

Company Size

N/A

Company Stage

N/A

Total Funding

N/A

Headquarters

United Arab Emirates

Founded

N/A

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • K2-V2 launched January 2026 as the UAE's first fully sovereign base model.
  • K2 Think V2 launched January 2026 on K2-V2, validating IFM's stack.
  • ICML 2026 booth recruiting signals active demand for researchers and engineers.

What critics are saying

  • OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic outspend IFM, compressing its talent-retention window.
  • K2-V2 depends on MBZUAI and UAE state priorities; policy shifts threaten funding.
  • If sovereign-model demand stalls, IFM becomes an academic lab without durable commercial leverage.

What makes Institute of Foundation Models unique

  • MBZUAI's IFM ships fully open K2-V2 with weights, data, and recipes.
  • Richard Morton says IFM is a sovereign AI factory for UAE systems.
  • Teams in Abu Dhabi, Paris, and Sunnyvale span research, engineering, and applied science.

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Benefits

Health Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

Paid Vacation

Paid Holidays

Parental Leave

Employee Assistance Program

Life Insurance

Disability Insurance

401(k) Plan

Wellness Program

Flexible Work Hours

Remote Work Options

Hybrid Work Options

Stock Options

Company Equity