Principal Product Manager - AI & Intelligent Manufacturing Systems

Location: Oakland, CA Office

Department: Product Management

Impact In This Role

As our Principal Product Manager - AI & Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, you’ll serve as a strategic and technical thought leader driving the vision, roadmap, and execution of AI-powered capabilities across MISUMI Americas Manufacturing Quoting and Fulfillment Platform. This is a highly visible, high-leverage role — one that shapes how AI and automation become foundational to MISUMI Americas operating system for new product development (NPD). You’ll partner directly with our AI R&D, data science, and platform architecture teams to define the core intelligence layer that powers quoting, supply orchestration, and manufacturing decision-making at scale.

You will own and evolve the product strategy that fuses advanced AI models, data-driven automation, and manufacturing domain intelligence into a cohesive system that sets new standards for operational efficiency, precision, and speed.

This role is ideal for a seasoned product leader with experience bringing AI-first enterprise platforms to life — someone equally comfortable discussing model architectures and data pipelines as they are business value and market differentiation.

You will report to the VP, Product Management.

Areas of Responsibility:

1. AI Technology Strategy & Product Vision

• Define the long-term AI technology strategy for MISUMI Americas digital manufacturing platform — including where and how to leverage LLMs, machine learning, computer vision, and reinforcement learning
• Partner with AI research and engineering leadership to translate R&D advances into scalable, customer-facing capabilities
• Identify and prioritize core AI product opportunities — from intelligent quoting and auto-classification of 3D models to predictive supplier matching and adaptive routing engines
• Drive the architectural vision for MISUMI Americas AI intelligence layer, ensuring alignment between data infrastructure, ML systems, and platform integration
• Evangelize the role of AI within the organization — educating teams on capabilities, limitations, and ethical deployment of intelligent systems

2. Deep Technical Product Leadership

• Serve as the product owner for AI infrastructure and model lifecycle management, including data acquisition, training, deployment, monitoring, and feedback loops
• Partner with ML engineers and data scientists to design human-in-the-loop workflows that continuously improve system accuracy and explainability
• Own the AI feature pipeline: define use cases, establish model performance metrics (precision, recall, latency, cost), and measure impact on business KPIs (quote accuracy, margin, lead time)
• Collaborate with platform engineering to ensure scalability, modularity, and compliance in AI integrations
• Drive responsible AI practices, including fairness, transparency, and auditability in model-driven decision systems

3. Solutions Integration & Application Development

• Lead the development of AI-driven application modules — such as automated quoting, manufacturability assessment, supplier recommendation, and production forecasting
• Work with product teams across quoting, fulfillment, and partner management to identify where intelligence adds differentiated value
• Ensure AI and automation capabilities are embedded seamlessly into MISUMI Americas core user experiences and operational workflows
• Act as a bridge between AI technology development and solution commercialization, ensuring innovations move efficiently from lab to production

4. Metrics, Experimentation, and Validation

• Define the performance framework for all AI-enabled systems, including model metrics (accuracy, throughput, latency), business KPIs (margin improvement, cycle time reduction), and adoption metrics
• Lead data-informed experimentation programs to validate new model capabilities and measure real-world impact before scaling
• Champion continuous learning loops between R&D, product, and operations teams

5. Cross-Functional & Executive Influence

• Partner with senior leadership across Product, Engineering, Data, and Operations to align AI investments with strategic business outcomes
• Influence architecture, resource allocation, and data strategy decisions that affect MISUMI Americas AI roadmap
• Mentor and guide other product managers in the organization on AI-first thinking and technical product management best practices
• Represent MISUMI Americas externally — at conferences, customer forums, and AI ecosystem events — as a thought leader in intelligent manufacturing systems

Experience/Qualifications:

Required

• 10+ years of product management experience, including 4+ years leading AI or ML-driven products from research to production
• Startup experience with demonstrated 0-to-MVP-to-1 product ownership; ideally at a company that achieved a successful exit (acquisition or IPO)
• Proven track record building AI-first SaaS or enterprise systems, ideally in manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, or industrial automation
• Deep understanding of AI technologies, including LLMs, supervised/unsupervised ML, computer vision, or predictive analytics pipelines
• Demonstrated success collaborating with AI research teams and data engineering to operationalize models into scalable, production-grade systems
• Fluency in data infrastructure concepts (feature stores, inference APIs, model retraining, observability)
• Strong technical intuition and ability to engage deeply with engineers and data scientists on architecture, experimentation, and trade-offs.
• Analytical rigor and comfort with experimentation frameworks, A/B testing, and quantitative product measurement
• Exceptional communication and influence skills — able to connect technical complexity to business impact and inspire alignment across functions

Preferred

• Domain experience in manufacturing, supply chain, or CAD/CAM ecosystems
• Experience designing or managing systems with human-in-the-loop AI, active learning, or automated decision-support models
• Working knowledge of product data ontologies, graph databases, or knowledge modeling for industrial applications
• Track record of thought leadership or published work on AI strategy, ML productization, or applied AI ethics

Physical Demands

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

While performing the duties of this job, the employee routinely is required to sit; walk; talk and hear; use hands to keyboard, fingers, handle, and feel; stoop, kneel, crouch, twist, crawl, reach, and stretch.

Perks and Benefits

• Competitive medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401K plan
• Parental leave programs 
• Paid volunteer days
• And much, much more!

MISUMI Americas is continuing to expand our remote US workforce. Applicants from the following states are eligible to apply:

Arizona (AZ), California (CA), District of Columbia, (DC), Delaware (DE), Florida (FL), Georgia (GA), Hawaii (HI), Iowa (IA), Illinois (IL), Indiana (IN), Kansas (KS), Massachusetts (MA), Maryland (MD), Michigan (MI), Minnesota (MN), Missouri (MO), North Carolina (NC), New Hampshire (NH), New Jersey (NJ), New York (NY), Nevada (NV), Ohio (OH), Oregon (OR), South Carolina (SC), Texas (TX), Tennessee (TN), Utah (UT), Virginia (VA), Washington (WA), West Virginia (WV), Wisconsin (WI), Wyoming (WY)

Salary Range: $210,000 to $230,000 per year, based upon experience 

Interested in learning more? We look forward to hearing from you soon.