Founding Product Lead — ModelVault

ModelVault is building the world’s first plug-and-play on-premise AI server — a fully-integrated appliance that ships with containerized LLMs, vision models, developer tools, and remote management built in. Designed for businesses that need local, secure, cloud-independent AI, ModelVault brings AI infrastructure in-house — without the complexity. We’re looking for a founder-type Product Lead to drive the development of our v1 hardware + software platform. You’ll work side-by-side with the founding team to take the product from zero to pilot deployments — owning strategy, execution, and market feedback. This is not just a product management job — it’s an opportunity to define a new category and build a company from the inside out. 🎯 What You’ll Own - Shape the product vision for our first integrated AI appliance — what it does, who it’s for, how it works - Define the v1 scope — which models to include, how to prioritize use cases, what UX + developer tools to build - Work closely with engineering to ship local model serving, fine-tuning workflows, remote update systems, and UI/CLI interfaces - Run product discovery with dev teams, research groups, and IT buyers to validate demand and refine positioning - Lead roadmap planning, customer pilots, pricing tests, and go-to-market experiments - Coordinate hardware + software integration with a focus on reliability, simplicity, and speed - Build the early systems that support scale — remote diagnostics, patching pipelines, customer feedback loops - Represent product thinking in every key decision — balancing technical feasibility with user impact and long-term leverage 🔧 You’ll Thrive If You… - Have 4–10 years of experience in product, engineering, or technical founding — ideally in devtools, infra, AI/ML, or embedded systems - Are fluent in technical product development: can work directly with engineers, understand system design tradeoffs, and write detailed specs - Have a bias for action and clarity — can move from vision to build to feedback quickly - Have worked on zero-to-one hardware/software products or deeply technical stacks - Think like a founder: prioritize ruthlessly, care about customers, and see constraints as a feature - Want to shape not just a product, but a category and a company 🧪 Bonus Points - Experience with containerized model stacks (e.g., vLLM, Ollama, Triton, Hugging Face) - Past work on embedded systems, edge computing, or AI appliances - Familiarity with RAG pipelines, inference optimization, or open-source LLM infra - Experience launching pilot programs or selling to technical B2B customers - Background in dev-rel, solution engineering, or technical community engagement 🌍 Why ModelVault? - Shape a foundational AI product that redefines how and where models run - Build at the intersection of AI, systems design, and product simplicity - Fully remote, async-friendly, and deeply product-focused founding culture - High-trust environment, with full ownership of the roadmap and strategy Originally posted on Himalayas