Applied Computing was founded in 2024 to build Orbital, a physics-informed foundation model for energyoperations. We’re live across oil and gas and petrochemicals, working towards our mission: sustainable abundancefor a growing planet.

The hydrocarbon industry keeps the world running. But its complexity has left operators tied to legacy systems,making critical decisions on less than 10% of available data. We built Orbital to change that. It’s a foundation modelbuilt specifically for energy that lets companies use AI at scale, harnessing all of their operational data and optimising in real time for any metric. Decisions get faster, operations get safer, and carbon intensity falls.

We’ve raised over $32 million, including one of the largest seed rounds for an AI company in the UK. We’re justgetting started.

The Role

Product Manager’s are responsible for product adoption, usage and value-generation. This means deeply understanding users and their technical requirements and owning delivery for a core area of Orbital. This is a customer- and domain-led role: you’ll spend real time with operators in petrochemicals to understand how decisions actually get made today, and translate that understanding into product capabilities and features that change how their plant is run.

This is a product delivery role. You’ll work closely with AI researchers, ML engineers, full stack engineers, project managers and account managers to invent new capabilities that change how the energy industry is run.

What You’ll Own

• Deep understanding of users, their problems, what matters to them and how they make decisions

• Product strategy and roadmap for your area of Orbital

• Strong working knowledge of downstream operations and the workflows Orbital needs to fit into

• Prioritisation decisions, balancing customer feedback against hypotheses of what will best drive impact

• Requirements, specs, and acceptance criteria

• Ongoing iteration and testing with engineering and research colleagues

• Close relationships and feedback loops with customers and users

• Product, usage and utilisation analytics

Must-Have Qualifications

• 5+ years as a Product Manager, ideally in enterprise B2B SaaS or deep-tech

• Experience with physics, chemistry, heavy industry, manufacturing or energy

• Direct experience in Oil & Gas or Energy, ideally downstream (refining, petrochemicals)

• A track record of inventing tech products

• Comfort operating with ambiguity, incomplete data, and evolving customer needs

• Clear, structured written and verbal communication — able to represent customer needs to a technical audienceand technical trade-offs back to customers

Nice to Haves (You’ll Learn)

• Experience building AI products – where the product is powered by in-house trained models

• Experience building agentic workflows and agentic product experiences

• Exposure to enterprise delivery environments

• Experience with process control, operations, or reliability engineering software

How We Work

• Process exists to serve delivery, not the other way around

• Pragmatism beats dogma; we adapt tools and rituals to reality

• We value clarity, speed, and ownership over perfect frameworks

• We iterate on process the same way we iterate on product

What This Role Is Not

• Not a delivery or operations role tracking sprint mechanics — that’s Product Operations

• Not a Scrum Master

• Not a passive requirements-taker; this role sets direction

• Not detached from the field — you’ll spend meaningful time with customers and operations teams

Core Responsibilities

Customer & Domain Expertise

• Spend regular time with customers — onsite where useful — to learn about their problems and understand their world

• Represent the voice of the customer inside the company, and the voice of the roadmap to customers

• Build and maintain deep knowledge of downstream O&G operations and how operators make decisions today

Product Strategy & Roadmap

• Translate customer needs into new features, functionality, workflows and capabilities

• Ensure your area of Orbital is adopted, used and creating value for customers

• Translate downstream operational challenges — refining constraints, petrochemical process economics, safety and compliance — into a clear, prioritised backlog

• Make and defend prioritisation calls, balancing near-term customer commitments with platform durability

Cross-Functional Delivery

• Partner closely with research and engineering leads to scope, spec, and sequence work

• Daily calibration of where your research and engineering colleagues should be focused on

• In the details that matter - scoping requirements, testing hypotheses and iterating on the latest release

• Coordinate with customer-facing project managers so committed timelines reflect real product and engineering capacity

Communication & Stakeholder Management

• Communicate roadmap, rationale, and trade-offs clearly to leadership, engineering, and customers

• Surface risks and scope trade-offs early — no surprises

• Maintain artefacts such as roadmap documents, release notes, and customer-facing capability overviews

What Success Looks Like

First 60–90 Days

• You’ve spent meaningful time with downstream customers and can speak fluently to their operational priorities

• A clear, prioritised roadmap exists for your product area, understood by engineering and leadership

• You’re the go-to person for “why are we building this” in your area

6–12 Months

• Your product area ships features, functionality and workflows that measurably move customer-defined metrics — safety, uptime, margin, carbon intensity

• Customer-facing and internal project managers are aligned on what’s being built and why

• Your roadmap decisions are trusted by engineering, leadership, and customers alike