About Applied Computing

Applied Computing was founded in 2024 to build Orbital, a physics-informed foundation model for energy operations. We came out of stealth less than a year ago and have seen exceptional early traction: live deployments across oil and gas, refineries, and petrochemicals, strategic investment from industry leaders, and validation from some of the world’s most demanding operators.

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 is a foundation model built 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 have raised over $40 million, including one of the largest seed rounds for an AI company in the UK. We are 32 people, flat structure, high autonomy. We’re just getting st arted.

The Role

Orbital is a technically groundbreaking product deployed in some of the most complex industrial environments on the planet. The science is proven and the results are real. What we need now is someone who can make it exceptional to use.

As Head of Product, you will own the end-to-end product experience: what we build, how it behaves, how operators interact with it day-to-day, and how we evolve it as we scale. You will work directly with our CAIO and engineering leadership to turn deep technical capability into software that people genuinely love using.

You do not need to arrive knowing the difference between a CCR unit and a hydrocracker. We will teach you the domain. What you must bring is relentless product craft: an obsession with usability, a sharp instinct for what matters to the person in front of the screen, and the discipline to ship things that workrather than things that look good on a roadmap.

This role is for someone who has already built products that people did not just use, they preferred. Who has made complex workflows feel simple. Who gets frustrated when good technology is buried under bad UX. Whounderstands that adoption is a product problem, not a training problem.

The Person

You are a product obsessive. Not a roadmap manager, not a process owner. Someone who genuinely cares whether the interface in front of an operator at 3am in a refinery control room is clear, fast, and trustworthy. You read user behaviour, not just user feedback. You know that what people say they want and what they actually need are often different things, and you have the tools and instincts to close that gap.

You can hold a rigorous conversation with a PhD-level Ai Researcher about model behaviour and then walk out and translate that into a product decision a plant operator will understand. You are comfortable being the bridge.

You move quickly, make decisions with incomplete information, and change your mind when the evidence demands it. You do not wait for consensus. You build things, watch what happens, and improve them.

Key Responsibilities

1. Product Strategy

and Roadmap-Own the Orbital product roadmap from strategy through to delivery,working closely with our CAIO and engine ering leads.

-Define and prioritise what we build next based on customer usage,deployment feedback, and commercial opportunity.

-Translate operator workflows and energy industry problems intoconcrete product decisions without needing those proble

ms explainedtwice.

-Make the hard calls on what we do not build, as ruthlessly as

the calls onwhat we do.

2. User Experience and Usability

• Own the end-to-end user experience across Orbital: dashboards, alerts,investigation workflows, configuration, and reporting.

• Establish and enforce usability standards. If something takes too manyclicks, too much training, or too much explanation, it isnot finished.

• Build a feedback loop with operators and engineers in the field. Fly outto customer sites. Sit in control rooms. Watch people usethe product.

• Work with design and engineering to produce interfaces that feel fast,clear, and reliable in high-stakes industrial environments.

3. Discovery and Customer Insight

• Run structured discovery with existing customers and prospects toidentify product gaps, friction points, and expansion opportunities.

• Synthesise usage data, customer calls, and field observations into clearproduct direction.

• Partner with forward deployed engineers and delivery teams to capturewhat is working and what is not,in production.

• Feed commercial intelligence back into product decisions: what isblocking sales, what is driving expansion, what is causing churn.

4. Delivery Partnership

• Work with engineering to define clear acceptancecriteria, scopeboundaries, and launch standards.

• Maintain a relentless focus on shipping. A perfect spec that ships late isnot better than a good spec that ships now.

• Own the product launch process: internal alignment, customercommunication, documentation, and adoption tracking.

• Measure what you ship. Track feature adoption, workflow completion,time-to-value, and usage depth. If you built it and nobody used it, that matters.

5. Platform Thinking

• Orbital runs across cloud, edge, and partner-nat

ive environmentsincluding Databricks and AWS. Product decisions must account fordep

loyment context.

• As we expand into new industry verticals and use cases, help definehow the product scales: what is core, what is configurable,what is bespoke.

• Contribute to product positioning and packaging decisions along side commer cial leadership.

What This Role Is Not

• A project management role. You are not here to run sprints, manage Jiraboards, or chase engineers for status updates.

• A customer success role. You care about customers, but your job is tobuild the product, not to manage the relationship.

• A design role. You will have opinions on UX and you will need to guidedesign quality, but you are

not the designer.

• A committee. You will consult widely but you will decide. If everyproduct decision requires five sign-offs, you are doing it wrong.

• A domain expert role. We are not hiring someone who already knowsenergy. We are hiring someone who already knows product.

Essential Experience

• Demonstrable track record of shipping software products that usersconsistently praised for ease of use and clarity.

• Experience working on complex B2B or enterprise software withtechnically sophisticated end users (engineers, analysts, operators, or equivalent).

• Able to read and act on product usage data. You have built and useddashboards, funnels, and behavioural analytics to make productdecisions.

Nice to Haves

• Exposure to industrial, operational technology, or engineering softwareproducts.

• Experience building products that run in constrained or specialistenvironments (edge, embed

ded, or regulated).

• Background working in or with energy, utilities, manufacturing, or process industries.

• Familiarity with data-heavy interfaces: time series visualisation, anomaly detection, process monitoring, or similar.

What Success Looks Like

Days 1-30

You have visited at least two customer sites. You have sat with operators in the

environments where Orbital runs. You have formed a clear view of the three

biggest gaps in the current product and presented them back to the leadership

team.

Days 30-90

You have taken ownership of the product roadmap. You have shipped at least

one meaningful improvement that demonstrably reduces friction for end

users. You have established a structured discovery rhythm with customers and

a usability feedback loop with engineering.

Months 3-6

Product adoption metrics are tracked and visible across the business. Feature

release quality has improved, defined by adoption rate and support ticket

volume. You have contributed to at least one commercial conversation where

product capability closed or advanced a deal.

Internal Only

Months 6-12

Orbital is measurably easier to use than when you arrived. You can point to

specific workflows that were simplified, specific friction removed, and specific

adoption curves that improved. New use cases are being enabled by a product

that is genuinely platform-ready rather than point-solution shaped.

How We Work

-Flat structure. No layers of management between you and the decision.

No committees for decisions that one person should own.

-High autonomy, high accountability. We will not tell you how to do the

job. We will care a lot whether you do it well.

-Direct communication. We say what we think, including when we

disagree. Feedback is fast and honest.

-Remote-first with real presence when it matters. Customer sites,

company offsites, key engineering sessions.

• We move quickly. We do not wait for perfection before shipping, but we

do hold the bar on quality once something is live.

Benefits

-Competitive salary benchmarked at the 90th percentile for the role,

level, and location.

-Meaningful equity. We are post-Series A and growing fast.

-25 days holiday plus bank holidays.

-Private health insurance.

-Remote-first with London, Bangalore and Houston hubs for

collaboration.

-Direct access to the founding team and a front-row seat to building one

of the most technically ambitious AI companies in Europe.