AI Product Lead, Portfolio

The Role We are hiring an AI Product Lead to drive product innovation across our portfolio of mission-critical software companies, from the diligence that decides what we buy to the AI features and reusable products we ship once we own them. You will join our central AI team, reporting to the Head of AI and working across London and Milan. Inside the team you will work directly with the Head of AI and our AI engineers; outside it, with the M&A team and portfolio company leadership, who keep ownership of their own product operations. Your mission is to turn AI capabilities into shipped products and measurable business value. We measure success by value created, adoption and how well it scales, not by features shipped, pilots, prototypes or roadmaps produced. It suits a product builder who prototypes their own ideas, moves between several businesses at once and takes direct responsibility for commercial outcomes. About Circeus Circeus is an AI-native holding company that acquires and evolves mission-critical software for the AI era. Through a centralised AI platform deployed across our portfolio, we expand software from systems of record into systems of action. We have raised $225m from leading global institutional investors and serve 250,000+ businesses worldwide, focusing on high-retention, deeply embedded software that powers the everyday economy. We operate as long-term owners, bringing the benefits of innovation and AI to the real economy.

What You'll Do
Before we buy
• Lead product due diligence on prospective acquisitions with the M&A and technical teams, covering product quality, customer experience, competitive positioning, roadmap and innovation capability.
• Assess AI disruption risk and defensibility for each target, and identify where AI can add features, improve the experience or open new revenue streams.
• Translate diligence findings into post-acquisition product strategies and 100-day priorities. Inside a portfolio company
• Work directly with portfolio company GMs, product leaders and engineers to prioritise AI features, owning selected initiatives from discovery and scoping through prototyping, launch and adoption.
• Speak directly with customers of our portfolio companies, including those who are struggling or have left, and turn what you hear into product decisions rather than feature requests.
• Modernise established, mission-critical products with frontier AI capabilities without compromising quality, reliability or the workflows customers depend on.
• Build the first working prototype yourself, grounded in the real codebase, with a clear hypothesis, success metric and decision gate for every experiment; hand engineers a prototype and a decision rather than a document, and partner with our AI engineers to take what works to production. Across the portfolio
• Identify recurring customer and operational problems across the portfolio and turn successful implementations in a single business into repeatable products deployed across several.
• Scope and launch reusable AI products and components with the central AI team's engineers, including build, buy or wait decisions, requirements and commercial models, and contribute to Circeus AI OS and its shared product infrastructure.
• Stop initiatives that do not show traction, concentrate resources on those creating measurable value and scale the winners into reliable products and repeatable processes.
• Own the portfolio AI product roadmap with the Head of AI as a short list of what we are stubborn about for the next 6 to 12 months, replanning the rest monthly and testing every commitment against what the next model generation will make unnecessary, track adoption, revenue contribution and return on engineering investment, and translate frontier AI developments into differentiated products.
• Run your own recurring work as AI-native loops that start without a prompt, and package what works as shared skills that product managers across the portfolio can install and use. What Success Looks Like Your first assignment is a live initiative, not a listening tour. Nobody will hand you a structure: the context is in our shared channels and knowledge base, and we expect you to read it and come back with a view. Within your first 90 days, you will have:
• Written a product view on at least one live acquisition target and defended it with the M&A team.
• Taken one portfolio initiative from discovery to a prototype tested with customers.
• Got your own recurring loops running without a prompt and shared them with the team as skills. Within your first year, you will have:
• Put at least one AI capability live in several portfolio companies, with measured adoption and revenue.
• Stopped the initiatives that did not show traction, with the reasons written down.
• Become a trusted product voice for GMs and the M&A team on what AI changes in their businesses. What We're Looking For
• At least one product or feature you took through to adoption, with the metric it moved and what you personally changed.
• A story of something hard you got done when the organisation was in the way.
• Work of yours that already runs without a prompt: scheduled agents or automations for recurring loops such as feedback triage, reporting or release notes.
• Product context kept in shared skills and knowledge bases that other people and agents use, not in your own chats.
• The habit of verifying AI output against code, data and sources by default, with an example of a time it was wrong and you caught it.
• Technical fluency to collaborate deeply with engineers, evaluate trade-offs, read a codebase with AI and write the reference code and prototypes engineers build from.
• Commercial judgement to assess opportunities on customer value, revenue potential, margin improvement and competitive differentiation.
• Ability to assess an existing software business, understand its product positioning and identify the most compelling opportunities to improve it.
• Comfort operating under uncertainty, testing rapidly and making evidence-based decisions.
• Entrepreneurial ownership across several businesses at once, influencing senior leaders and taking direct responsibility for outcomes.
• Experience turning bespoke solutions into reusable products, platforms or shared capabilities. Nice to Have
• Prior M&A or product due diligence experience; strong product judgement and the ability to learn new software markets quickly matter more.
• Background in B2B SaaS, AI-native start-ups, vertical software, product-led technology businesses or multi-product environments.
• Experience modernising established or legacy software products rather than only greenfield builds.
• Experience as the first PM at a start-up, as a founder, or as a forward-deployed or solutions engineer who moved into product. Why Circeus
• A growing portfolio of software businesses to work across rather than a single product.
• AI applied to real commercial problems, with impact you can measure in adoption and revenue.
• Ownership and pace from your first week, with direct access to the Head of AI, the M&A team and portfolio leadership.
• A seat in the central AI team, with AI engineers who build working prototypes with you in days or weeks.
• One team across London, Milan and Sarajevo, operating as a single system rather than separate offices.
• Competitive compensation and the scope to grow with the portfolio.