Anywhere in Europe
Principal - Data Products & AI
This is a role for the operator who takes data and AI products that survive prototype to daily use and first customers - and who builds the data-product machine every future Cenotian bet will run on.
We are not hiring a data scientist, and we are not hiring a product manager. We are hiring the person who sits where data, AI, product and commercial validation meet - with personal accountability for adoption, and the judgment to design data-product functions that do not yet exist.
Context
Cenotian is the market maker for robotics, restoring industrial sovereignty in the West. We provide capital and capabilities to back physical automation projects across the US and Europe. Today, the engineers who build and install robots, machines and systems on site are under immense financial pressure and unable to scale. We remove that bottleneck, giving them the customized financing and services they need to accelerate automation in Western production. Cenotian is now in hyper-growth: launching new bets, entering new markets, and building the organizational backbone to sustain it. The Special Missions Group is Cenotian's bet-taking machine: a small number of founder-grade generalists who turn the company's high-conviction bets into shipped products. The SMG now produces a new class of problem: data and AI bets are surviving prototype. A product that clears prototype must enter a live workflow, change a decision, capture better data and operate at a known cost. This role exists so that every data bet that earns the right to users actually gets them.
Position overview
The Principal - Data Products & AI owns data-product commercialization and AI-enabled workflows as their sandbox, with a special focus in the first months on ontology-based decision products, agent-assisted workflows and external intelligence propositions. The role sits at the intersection of the existing SMG, Data, Engineering, Finance and Commercial teams - one of the most technically collaborative seats in the company. This is an execution role with design judgment.
- Reports to:
- Head of Special Missions
- Location:
- Anywhere in Europe
Key responsibilities
- 01
Own bets, the SMG way
- Own bets end-to-end in the same bets approach as every SMG principal: timeboxed, gated, kill-by-default.
- Your bets are data-product bets: taking proprietary information from prototype to daily use, first customers and a measured operating model.
- 02
Provide centralized data-product support across bets
- Plug into bets when they produce a valuable dataset, workflow or decision surface - potentially several at once.
- Co-own the data product with the principal who owns the bet. You supply a kit, not a takeover: the owning principal keeps end-to-end ownership.
- Work daily with the SMG principals who own the bets, the VP Data who owns the canonical layer, Engineering on production systems, and Finance and Commercial on live use cases.
- 03
Put products into live workflows
- Define the user, the decision, the proprietary advantage and the value of each product before building.
- Query source data directly, understand its quality and build the first version using code, SQL, APIs, AI agents and lightweight interfaces.
- Put products into live commercial, financial, technical or portfolio workflows and carry personal accountability for adoption.
- Test external benchmarks, ratings, market maps and intelligence propositions with real customers and partners.
- Measure usage, decision impact, time saved, willingness to pay and new data captured.
- 04
Build products and services
- Spend a portion of your time building, like every SMG principal: tools, agents, data pipelines, automations and the products the data-product machine itself needs.
- Keep products inside the canonical ontology and preserve provenance, confidence and human review where it matters.
- 05
Design how data products evolve, leave playbooks behind
- The whole playground of data products and AI-enabled workflows sits under this role. As Cenotian gains traction, you define what comes next: what Data should own, what Engineering should harden, what can become an external product, where to build teams, and who to hire.
- Decide when a hacked-together product should spin off into its own function or business, and design what it looks like.
- Every product launch produces a playbook: replicable for the next dataset, the next workflow and the next customer.
You'll know it's working when
Data-product bets hit their user and decision targets on the timeline set at the gate.
Owning principals describe you as a force multiplier, not a dependency.
Every product has measured usage, decision impact and data capture.
The second launch runs faster than the first because the playbook exists.
Successful products enrich the canonical ontology rather than creating parallel data silos.
Products spin off at the right moment: designed, staffed, measured and documented.
Candidate profile
What we require
- A track record as a top operator: has taken data products, workflows or functions from zero to live and delivered on ambitious targets.
- Ships outcomes in ambiguous, thinly-resourced environments where the playbook does not exist yet - and writes it as they go.
- Can query data, build a working product and distinguish a useful system from an impressive demo.
- Thinks naturally in user value, data quality, adoption, decision impact and compounding proprietary data.
- AI-fluent and shipping with AI tooling, collapsing what used to take a team into one person plus agents.
Nice to have
- Prior data-product, analytics-engineering, AI product, RevOps, growth or special-projects roles.
- Experience with ontologies, SQL, APIs, entity resolution, agent workflows or market-intelligence products.
- Experience inside fintech, industrial technology, robotics, vertical software or another data-rich operating environment.
Personality
- Extremely powerful operator: strong can-do attitude, high agency and ownership.
- Thrives in ambiguity, complexity and ambitious targets.
- Ego-less by design: co-owns bets with other principals and feels as accountable for their success as the colleague who technically owns the bet.
- Obsessed with turning messy information into products people actually use.
- High stamina, sound judgment, extreme resilience.
Organizational context
The Principal - Data Products & AI will work most closely with:
- Head of Special Missions - sets the data-product bet portfolio, gates missions and holds the Principal accountable for adoption and operating outcomes.
- Other SMG Principals - bring proprietary data, workflows and product opportunities from their bets. This Principal supplies the data-product kit without taking over end-to-end ownership.
- VP, Data - owns the canonical ontology, data architecture, quality standards and long-term integrity of the data layer on which the products are built.
- Head of Engineering - hardens validated products, agents and workflows into secure, reliable production systems.
- Head of Finance and Underwriting - define decision use cases across eligibility, transactions, portfolio monitoring and capital-partner reporting.
- Head of Commercial and Sales - bring customer problems, distribution, willingness-to-pay evidence and external product feedback.
Apply for this role
Tell us who you are and where to find you. A CV is welcome, not required.