About Applied Computing Applied Computing was founded in 2024 to build Orbital, a physics-informedfoundation model for energy operations. We came out of stealth less than ayear ago and have seen exceptional early traction: live deployments across oiland gas, refineries, and petrochemicals, strategic investment from industryleaders, and validation from some of the world’s most demanding operators. The hydrocarbon industry keeps the world running. But its complexity has leftoperators tied to legacy systems, making critical decisions on less than 10% ofavailable data. We built Orbital to change that. It is a foundation model built specifically forenergy that lets companies use AI at scale, harnessing all of their operationaldata and optimising in real time for any metric. Decisions get faster, operationsget safer, and carbon intensity falls. We have raised over $40 million, including one of the largest seed rounds foran AI company in the UK. We are 32 people, flat structure, high autonomy.We’re just getting started. The RoleOrbital is a technically groundbreaking product deployed in some of the mostcomplex industrial environments on the planet. The science is proven and theresults are real. What we need now is someone who can make it exceptional touse. As Head of Product, you will own the end-to-end product experience: what webuild, how it behaves, how operators interact with it day-to-day, and how weevolve it as we scale. You will work directly with our CAIO and engineeringleadership to turn deep technical capability into software that peoplegenuinely love using. You do not need to arrive knowing the difference between a CCR unit and ahydrocracker. We will teach you the domain. What you must bring is relentlessproduct craft: an obsession with usability, a sharp instinct for what matters tothe person in front of the screen, and the discipline to ship things that workrather than things that look good on a roadmap. This role is for someone who has already built products that people did notjust use, they preferred. Who has made complex workflows feel simple. Whogets frustrated when good technology is buried under bad UX. Whounderstands that adoption is a product problem, not a training problem. The PersonYou are a product obsessive. Not a roadmap manager, not a process owner.Someone who genuinely cares whether the interface in front of an operator at3am in a refinery control room is clear, fast, and trustworthy.You read user behaviour, not just user feedback. You know that what peoplesay they want and what they actually need are often different things, and youhave the tools and instincts to close that gap. You can hold a rigorous conversation with a PhD-level Ai Researcher aboutmodel behaviour and then walk out and translate that into a product decisiona plant operator will understand. You are comfortable being the bridge. You move quickly, make decisions with incomplete information, and changeyour mind when the evidence demands it. You do not wait for consensus. Youbuild things, watch what happens, and improve them. Key Responsibilities1. Product Strategy and Roadmap-Own the Orbital product roadmap from strategy through to delivery,working closely with our CAIO and engineering leads.-Define and prioritise what we build next based on customer usage,deployment feedback, and commercial opportunity.-Translate operator workflows and energy industry problems intoconcrete product decisions without needing those problems explainedtwice.-Make the hard calls on what we do not build, as ruthlessly as the calls onwhat we do. 2. User Experience and Usability- Own the end-to-end user experience across Orbital: dashboards, alerts,investigation workflows, configuration, and reporting.- Establish and enforce usability standards. If something takes too manyclicks, too much training, or too much explanation, it is not finished.- Build a feedback loop with operators and engineers in the field. Fly outto customer sites. Sit in control rooms. Watch people use the product.- Work with design and engineering to produce interfaces that feel fast,clear, and reliable in high-stakes industrial environments. 3. Discovery and Customer Insight- Run structured discovery with existing customers and prospects toidentify product gaps, friction points, and expansion opportunities.- Synthesise usage data, customer calls, and field observations into clearproduct direction.- Partner with forward deployed engineers and delivery teams to capturewhat is working and what is not, in production.- Feed commercial intelligence back into product decisions: what isblocking sales, what is driving expansion, what is causing churn. 4. Delivery Partnership- Work with engineering to define clear acceptance criteria, scopeboundaries, and launch standards.- Maintain a relentless focus on shipping. A perfect spec that ships late isnot better than a good spec that ships now.- Own the product launch process: internal alignment, customercommunication, documentation, and adoption tracking.- Measure what you ship. Track feature adoption, workflow completion,time-to-value, and usage depth. If you built it and nobody used it, thatmatters. 5. Platform Thinking- Orbital runs across cloud, edge, and partner-native environmentsincluding Databricks and AWS. Product decisions must account fordeployment context.- As we expand into new industry verticals and use cases, help definehow the product scales: what is core, what is configurable, what isbespoke.- Contribute to product positioning and packaging decisions alongsidecommercial leadership. What This Role Is Not- A project management role. You are not here to run sprints, manage Jiraboards, or chase engineers for status updates.- A customer success role. You care about customers, but your job is tobuild the product, not to manage the relationship.- A design role. You will have opinions on UX and you will need to guidedesign quality, but you are not the designer.- A committee. You will consult widely but you will decide. If everyproduct decision requires five sign-offs, you are doing it wrong.- A domain expert role. We are not hiring someone who already knowsenergy. We are hiring someone who already knows product. Essential Experience- Demonstrable track record of shipping software products that usersconsistently praised for ease of use and clarity.- Experience working on complex B2B or enterprise software withtechnically sophisticated end users (engineers, analysts, operators, orequivalent).- Able to read and act on product usage data. You have built and useddashboards, funnels, and behavioural analytics to make productdecisions.- Experience working directly with ML or AI engineering teams, and aworking understanding of how model-driven products behavedifferently from rule-based ones.- Comfortable representing the product to customers, prospects, andinvestors. You can demo the product, explain the roadmap, and handlehard questions without preparation.- Minimum five years in a product role, with at least two in a senior orlead position owning a full product area. Nice to Haves- Exposure to industrial, operational technology, or engineering softwareproducts.- Experience building products that run in constrained or specialistenvironments (edge, embedded, or regulated).- Background working in or with energy, utilities, manufacturing, orprocess industries.- Familiarity with data-heavy interfaces: time series visualisation,