Head of Product & Engineering - AI Lab

Technology, Product & Data

Our team of 450 colleagues across Technology, Product and Data is at the heart of The Economist Group’s digital-first agenda. Together, we design, build and optimise the digital products, platforms and data capabilities that power our business and reach millions of people around the world. Whether you're an engineer, product manager, designer, data scientist or analyst, you'll work on products that have real-world impact. From enhancing economist.com and developing new products for Economist Intelligence to creating personalised experiences and applying AI to solve complex challenges, you'll help shape how consumers, businesses and government leaders access trusted insights. Working in cross-functional teams, we combine engineering excellence, product thinking and data expertise to solve meaningful problems, experiment with new technologies and continuously improve the experiences we create. It's an opportunity to do challenging, purposeful work alongside curious, collaborative colleagues, while helping drive sustainable growth for one of the world's most trusted brands.

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The role

We are seeking a Head of Product & Engineering to lead The Economist AI Lab's product and technical work. You will be accountable for the full 0-1 journey - from deciding what to work on in the first place, to developing and validating working products: setting direction, shaping the roadmap, guiding discovery, making architectural decisions and ensuring that what we ship is useful, reliable and worthy of The Economist’s heritage and mission. This is a hands-on leadership role for a small, multidisciplinary team spanning product, engineering and design, working alongside editorial colleagues embedded in the Lab.

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Responsibilities

• Set the direction for the AI Lab - translating our broader editorial mission, company objectives and the evolving AI technology frontier into a focused roadmap of innovation directions and prospective products
• Lead and grow a team of multidisciplinary specialists across product, design and engineering; create the conditions for rapid innovation and exploration and a culture of quality that is worthy of our brand
• Be the voice of the future customer, ensuring our work is focused on ambitious, high-potential, customer-centred opportunities that will create real value
• Own the 0-1 process: generate ideas, coordinate research, prioritise prototype development and user testing and orchestrate from beta launch to production, using evidence - and a good amount of taste - to decide what to improve, scale or stop along the way
• Work closely with editorial colleagues (both inside the AI Lab and more broadly) to imagine and create products that amplify our journalism while protecting its quality, provenance and independence.
• Shape the technical direction: lead on architecture and build-versus-buy decisions, stay close to the code, and establish the engineering practices for high-quality, novel AI product development
• Connect the Lab's work to platforms, data and priorities across The Economist Group; define how success is measured and move concepts that work into the right long-term home

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Who you are

• Experience leading the development of B2C digital products, with accountability for both product outcomes and engineering delivery. Consumer subscription, media, e-commerce or marketplace background is strongly preferred.
• A track record of taking products from 0-1: finding valuable problems, testing assumptions, shipping quickly and learning from real users.
• Experience building and operating AI-powered products including practical knowledge of LLM application patterns, evaluation approaches and how the frontier of capabilities is moving.
• A strong engineering background and the technical judgement to guide architecture, challenge decisions and earn the confidence of senior engineers.
• Team building: A strong record of hiring senior engineering talent in a competitive market and of raising the technical bar of an existing team.
• The ability to make progress in ambiguous, fast-changing environments without adding unnecessary process.
• Clear communication with technical, editorial and commercial audiences, including the ability to explain assumptions and trade-offs directly.
• A deep appreciation of The Economist's journalistic values: intellectual rigour, a global outlook and editorial independence.

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