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