Latent Defense

Job Description: Director of Product

About Latent Defense

Latent Defense is building the world model for cybersecurity; the product graphs a company's entire system across all layers, identifies all attack paths and assigns criticality rankings, and provides remediation for each path. The team is building an autonomous system that rigorously models attack paths, orchestrates agents to validate each path, and remediates confirmed vulnerabilities at every step of the attack chain. They’re currently in an exciting phase of scaling from a sharp early product into something that runs autonomously across real-world environments, from git repos to cloud deployments. Backed by top early-stage investors, they are still operating in stealth mode but gaining serious traction.

About the Role

Latent Defense doesn't have a Product Manager yet as the founders have owned product decisions to date. This hire will be the company's first product hire, partnering directly with the founders and the engineering team to define the roadmap, write specs, and ship features for the autonomous threat modeling system. This is not a people-management role today; there's no team to lead for the foreseeable future. But as Latent Defense scales past its current team and product surface area, this person is expected to grow into the company's Head of Product.

This is a hybrid role based in NYC (Nomad, 26th & 6th), with a minimum of 3 days/week in the office.

What You'll Do

• Own the product roadmap for Latent Defense's autonomous threat modeling system, partnering directly with the founders and engineering team

• Translate a complex, adversarial domain (attack path modeling, agent orchestration, automated remediation) into clear specs and prioritized backlogs engineers can execute against

• Run customer discovery with security leaders (CISOs, security engineers) to ground the roadmap in what actually reduces risk in their environments

• Define and track the metrics that show whether the product is working, for customers and for the business

• Represent the customer and market perspective in technical tradeoff conversations with engineering

• Build the product function from scratch: process, specs, discovery cadence, and prioritization frameworks that don't exist yet

• Partner with the founders on GTM and enterprise deal cycles, translating customer requirements into roadmap commitments

• Be the connective tissue between customers, engineering, and the founders as the company scales past its current team

What You Bring

• 12+ years as a Product Manager, ideally with 0-to-1 or early-stage startup experience

• Background in complex, technical, or enterprise software; cybersecurity, security, dev tools, or AI/ML experience strongly preferred

• Comfortable writing specs and making tradeoffs directly with engineers on a technical, adversarial product surface

• Track record running customer discovery and translating it into a defensible roadmap

• Strong written and verbal communicator, able to translate between technical and business audiences

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity at a small, fast-moving seed-stage company without a defined product process already in place

Nice to Haves

• Prior experience as a first or founding PM, or otherwise building a product function from scratch

• Prior experience at a cybersecurity or security-adjacent company

• Technical background (CS degree, some experience in SWE/AI/ML roles)

• Familiarity with agent orchestration frameworks, LLM-based systems, or MCP-style protocols

• Experience selling into or supporting technical enterprise buyers (CISOs, security engineers)

What You'll Get

• Ground-floor product leadership role at a fast-moving, seed-stage security startup

• Direct partnership with the founders and the founding engineering team

• A clear path to Head of Product as the team and product surface area scale

• Base Salary: $220,000-$250,000

• Top of market health insurance and unlimited PTO

• Hybrid role based in NYC (Nomad, 26th & 6th), minimum 3 days/week in office

What We Value

Latent Defense believes cybersecurity should be proactive, not reactive. The team values product thinkers and engineers who think adversarially by default, build mental models of new domains quickly, and care as much about the lifecycle of what they build (observability, testing, scale, trust) as whether it works today.