Product Lead - R&D

Product Lead – Office of R&D

Location: Hyderabad/Bangalore/Gurgaon

Arcesium is a financial technology and professional services firm, delivering solutions to some of the world’s most sophisticated financial institutions, including hedge funds, banks, and institutional asset managers. Expertly designed to achieve a single source of truth throughout a client’s ecosystem, Arcesium’s cloud-native technology is built to systematize the most complex tasks.

Building on a platform developed and tested by one of the world’s leading investment and technology development firms, the D. E. Shaw group, Arcesium launched as an independent company in 2015. Arcesium received additional equity backing from a second seed client, Blackstone Alternative Asset Management, the world’s largest discretionary allocator to hedge funds. In January 2020, J.P. Morgan made a strategic investment in the company. Arcesium supports more than $675+ billion in assets with a staff of over 2000+ software engineering, accounting, operations, and treasury professionals.

We are looking for an exceptionally talented individual to join our Product Group as a Product Lead in the Office of R&D at one of our India offices. The Office of R&D is Arcesium's central strategic function, responsible for overseeing all firm-funded R&D initiatives while ensuring transparency, accountability, and ROI maximization.

In this role, you'll be instrumental in strategic oversight and optimization of Arcesium's growing R&D investment portfolio, ensuring our initiatives deliver maximum value and align with the firm's transformation objectives. Additionally, you'll also build scalable frameworks that enable the organization to innovate more efficiently - standardized investment prioritization processes, robust R&D progress tracking, uniform firmwide insights (townhalls, board reporting, roadmaps), and more. Most importantly, you'll create the infrastructure and systems that empower teams across Arcesium to execute on R&D initiatives at scale while maintaining strategic alignment across the organization.

What you’ll do:

• Design and implement scalable frameworks for evaluating R&D investments, while also conducting independent review & thought leadership to enable leadership to make data-driven decisions about capital allocation and strategic priorities.
• Develop and institutionalize repeatable processes for R&D governance, creating structures that enable the organization to effectively manage an expanding portfolio of initiatives while aligning with the firm's transformation objectives
• Develop and manage comprehensive program monitoring systems while actively tracking R&D initiatives, budget utilization, and milestone achievement - serving as the key liaison between Program Owners and leadership to drive visibility into progress, risks, and mitigation strategies
• Maintain the overall R&D roadmap and drive comprehensive reporting across key forums (quarterly reviews, board meetings, townhalls) - delivering standardized insights on program progress, current and projected spend, strategic impact, wins, setbacks, and more.
• Architect standardized processes for measuring and monitoring ROI across the R&D portfolio, working cross-functionally with Finance and CPD to establish consistent methodologies that enable data-driven investment decisions
• Assist in product operations; collect / analyze product usage, improve tooling and processes for product planning and execution.
• Assist with customer-facing content (roadmaps, client facing presentations) related to R&D deliverables.

What you’ll need:

• 7+ years of experience as a product manager, program manager or product operations manager
• Outstanding communication skills (written, verbal) with proven ability to influence various audiences (firm-wide, executive management) and translate complex concepts into clear, actionable insights
• Strong track record of implementing governance structures and measurement systems across complex organizations
• Strong Excel skills and a sound knowledge of Jira (or other software development tools); technical knowledge of databases and setting up analytical tools will be preferred.
• Be able to work in an environment where structure needs to be defined, and to work with multiple teams to set up new practices and processes.
• Critical thinking and the ability to articulate standpoints/ideas to influence multiple stakeholders.
• Experience working cross functionally across the organization: Technology, Product, Finance, Product Marketing, etc.
• Outstanding academic background & passion to work in a high-tech software development environment. The candidate should be able to understand and translate technology very well, into simple yet comprehensive terms for end users.