Principal Product Manager - AI Platform

As we continue to grow our global subscriber base and evolve our digital experience, Artificial Intelligence has become a foundational capability underpinning how we create, structure and deliver our content. 

The Economist AI Platform is the technical foundation that underpins all AI initiatives across The Economist Group. It supports the development and deployment of safe, scalable and innovative AI-driven experiences. 

The role

We are seeking an experienced and highly capable Principal Product Manager to lead the development and evolution of the AI Platform, ensuring that teams across TEG have robust tools, infrastructure and frameworks to build trusted, high-quality AI products. 

This role is ideal for someone who is both strategic and hands-on; someone who can set a vision for a complex technical domain whilst also driving the measurable improvements that will make the AI Platform truly impactful. 

The PPM for AI Platform will define and deliver the core technical enablement layer that powers AI across The Economist Group. This position is responsible for building production-ready capabilities, including: 

• Model deployment, orchestration and routing 
• Evaluation and benchmarking frameworks 
• Safety, guardrails and governance tooling 
• Conversational and multi-turn architecture 
• Retrieval and content-querying backbones 
• Developer experience, tooling and documentation 

You will partner closely with platform engineering, machine learning engineering, data science and multiple product teams to ensure that these capabilities are robust, scalable and aligned with the needs of the organisation. 

You’ll be embedded in, and lead, a cross-functional team. You will prioritise and deliver the AI platform roadmap, ensuring that infrastructure and feature foundations are in place to enable other product teams to innovate with confidence. 

Your focus will be on technical excellence, operational reliability, and empowering teams at scale, whilst maintaining a clear connection to customer value and editorial integrity.

Responsibilities 

• Own the product vision for the Group’s AI Platform, defining how model deployment, evaluation, conversational systems and knowledge frameworks should evolve. 
• Translate technical opportunities into platform capabilities, ensuring they can be safely and consistently adopted across teams. 
• Partner with engineering to define infrastructure for model hosting, observability, routing, versioning and deployment workflows. 
• Lead the development of a uniform evaluation and benchmarking framework that enables rigorous measurement of model and feature performance. 
• Define the conversational architecture that supports multi-turn interactions, off-platform assistants, internal tools and customer experiences. 
• Work closely with Engineering, Data Science and Information Security to build robust governance, safety, guardrail and risk-mitigation features. 
• Act as the core partner to product teams across the Group to understand their needs, and ensure the AI platform enables them effectively. 
• Drive a culture of technical clarity, ensuring documentation, APIs, and internal tools deliver an excellent developer experience. 
• Set clear priorities that balance short-term operational needs with long-term architectural evolution.
• Communicate platform strategy, roadmaps and decisions across the business at the appropriate level of detail. 
• Establish and track KPIs for platform reliability, performance, adoption and efficiency.
• Work in close collaboration with delivery, engineering, design and business stakeholders to scope, develop and launch high-quality platform capabilities. 

Who you are

• Builder: You have shipped complex technical platforms or AI/ML-powered systems and understand how to design abstractions that scale. 
• Technical: You can dive into system architecture, model deployment workflows, API design and MLOps practices to make informed product decisions. 
• Documenter: Strong ability to write clear user stories, system requirements, architectural briefs and technical product specifications. 
• Listener: Adept at understanding the needs of engineers, data scientists, editorial partners and product teams. 
• Communicator: Able to articulate complex concepts simply and compellingly, tailoring communication to technical and non-technical audiences. 
• Curious: Deep interest in emerging AI tooling, evaluation methods, and how platform infrastructure enables innovation. 
• Pragmatic: A bias for incremental, value-driven delivery - balancing ambition with operational realities. 
• Humble and collaborative: Comfortable learning, asking questions, and working with diverse teams in a fast-moving environment. 

Domain knowledge 

• Strong understanding of AI/ML systems, including model deployment, LLMs, retrieval systems and evaluation techniques.
• Experience working on platform teams or building shared systems used across multiple products.
• Understanding of how content-led products are built, structured and scaled.
• Enthusiasm for The Economist’s mission, journalism and the opportunities that AI provides to enhance our global offering.

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