Product Manager at hatchit

hatch I.T. is partnering with Expression to find a Product Manager. See details below: About The Role: Expression is seeking a Product Manager to join their Product Team. This role is critical for the intersection of product, engineering, and client engagement, supporting the development and evolution of Expression’s Agentic AI platform. This platform enables enterprise customers—particularly within National Security and Federal Civilian sectors—to move from generative AI that “chats” to trusted and verifiable systems that “act.” This role is responsible for building, delivering, and continuously improving product capabilities while working closely with stakeholders, customers, and cross-functional teams. You’ll be embedded in a cross-functional product pod alongside frontend and backend engineers, AI engineering, QA/test, DevSecOps, design, and technical writing. The ideal candidate combines strong technical fluency with product thinking, thrives in a fast-paced environment, and demonstrates a strong bias for action and ownership. About the Company: Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Washington DC, Expression provides data fusion, data analytics, software engineering, information technology, and electromagnetic spectrum management solutions to the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of State, and national security community. Expression’s “Perpetual Innovation” culture focuses on creating immediate and sustainable value for their clients via agile delivery of tailored solutions built through constant engagement with their clients. Expression was ranked #1 on the Washington Technology 2018's Fast 50 list of fastest growing small business Government contractors and a Top 20 Big Data Solutions Provider by CIO Review. Responsibilities: Product Management & Delivery • Own the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for your area of the platform. • Solicit, refine, and prioritize requirements from current and prospective customers, the Expression executive team, and other internal stakeholders • Define, prioritize, and deliver end-to-end product features supporting the Agentic AI platform • Define requirements for LLM-based services, agent workflows, and orchestration layers • Take full ownership of features from concept through production, including testing, deployment, and monitoring • Track and drive improvements to product performance and reliability through metrics and partnership with engineering Product Collaboration & Execution • Translate customer and business needs into clear product requirements with documented trade-offs • Collaborate with engineering, design, and stakeholders to refine features and ensure alignment with business goals • Contribute to backlog refinement, sprint planning, and agile ceremonies • Provide input on feasibility, scope, and technical design decisions Customer Engagement & Implementation • Collaborate directly with clients to support implementation and adoption of the platform • Participate in product demonstrations and technical discussions with current and potential customers • Translate client needs into actionable technical solutions and enhancements • Support deployment and customization efforts in mission environments Platform Evolution & Innovation • Contribute to the design and influence the evolution of core platform architecture and components • Influence system scalability, reliability, and performance improvements • Lead or contribute to research, prototyping, and evaluation of emerging technologies • Track emerging AI tools, techniques, and research, and surface promising candidates for evaluation and potential platform integration Data, AI, and System Design • Define product strategy and requirements for retrieval and context engineering systems • Drive product direction for vector search systems and vector database integration • Shape product strategy for LLM-based applications targeted at enterprise use • Ensure efficient data flows and integration across platform components AI Safety, Evaluation & Trust • Define and prioritize requirements for evaluation frameworks, agent behavior monitoring, and red-teaming. • Partner with engineering and security to ensure agentic systems behave safely, predictably, and within mission constraints. • Champion practices that make agentic AI verifiable to customers — explainability, auditability, and traceability of agent actions. Cross-Functional Collaboration • Work closely with engineering, design, marketing, business development, infrastructure, and security teams • Communicate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences • Produce technical documentation, architecture diagrams, and design proposals Continuous Improvement & Product Thinking • Use metrics, user feedback, and experimentation to improve product capabilities • Balance speed, quality, and long-term maintainability in engineering decisions • Advocate for the end user through thoughtful feature design and implementation Qualifications: • Bachelor’s degree in Business, Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field. • 8+ years of progressive product management experience, ideally in federal IT or enterprise software environments. • Working knowledge of agentic AI frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, Strands, or similar) • Technical fluency sufficient to engage credibly with engineers on AI/ML services and APIs • Familiarity with retrieval and context engineering approaches and how they’re built and deployed • Familiarity with vector search systems and vector databases • Experience shaping product strategy for LLM-based applications • Familiarity with Docker and cloud-native environments (AWS and/or Azure) • Excellent written and verbal communication skills • Active Secret clearance or above ideal but not required • Eligible to obtain clearance (U.S. Citizenship required) Preferred Qualifications: • SAFe POPM (Product Owner/Product Manager), CSPO, or Pragmatic Institute certification. • Cloud certifications (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud). • Technical familiarity with modern data platforms (SQL, NoSQL, data lakes). • Direct experience working with or within public sector organizations (Federal civilian, DoD, intelligence community). • Hands-on software development experience. • Background in machine learning research or engineering. • Experience prototyping new product concepts. What Success Looks Like: In your first 6 months, you’ll build deep working relationships across engineering, design, and customers; take ownership of the roadmap for your product area; and establish a regular discovery cadence grounded in real mission needs. By the end of your first year, you’ll have shipped meaningful improvements to platform adoption and reliability backed by clear metrics, surfaced emerging customer needs that influence the broader platform roadmap, and delivered at least one major new capability that materially expands what customers can accomplish.