Product Manager, Applied Research
About the role
Luma's mission is to build unified general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world. We focus on multimodality, believing it is crucial for intelligence. Our goal is to push the frontier of multimodal foundation models, enabling systems that can see, understand, show, and interact with the world to effect change.
Where You Come In: Luma's research teams have traditionally operated independently, pushing the boundaries on multimodal foundation models. However, as we shift towards enterprise sales-led growth, there's a need for a clear bridge between research and product. This role bridges the gap between Luma's cutting-edge research and our core products—Canvas, Agents, and the model platform. The ideal candidate will own the product strategy, ensuring that research informs product development and vice versa.
What You'll Do
Own the product strategy for translating Luma's frontier research capabilities into shippable features across Canvas, Agents, and the model platform.
Work directly within the research team to shape priorities, ensuring model development and evaluation are informed by real enterprise needs in marketing, advertising, and entertainment.
Establish and operate the feedback loops between research, product, go-to-market, and forward-deployed teams—so that market signals flow into research prioritization and research breakthroughs flow into product planning.
Interpret evaluation results and research findings to identify which emerging capabilities have the highest product and commercial leverage— and make bets accordingly.
Build prototypes yourself to validate product ideas before committing engineering resources—using the models directly to test hypotheses about what's possible and what customers will value.
Define the product implications of research advances in multimodal understanding, generation, tool use, and agent capabilities—translating "the model can now do X" into "customers can now solve Y."
Partner with the Agent PM and Enterprise PM to ensure research priorities align with the capabilities that enterprise products and customer deployments actually need.
Drive the cadence and process for research-to-product handoffs—defining what "ready to ship" means, managing the transition from research prototype to production feature, and owning the quality bar.
Who You Are
Principal or Staff-level product management experience (L6 seniority or above) with a track record of bridging pure research and ambitious product development at an AI lab or applied AI company.
Genuinely comfortable in a research environment— you can read evaluations, understand what they mean, ask the right questions, and help researchers see the product implications of their work.
Have shipped products that originated in research—not just optimized existing products, but taken emergent capabilities and turned them into new product surfaces.
Can build prototypes yourself— you have the technical depth to work directly with models, write prompts, test hypotheses, and validate ideas before involving a full engineering team.
Operate with extremely high agency and a strong self-starter mentality—research environments are inherently ambiguous and this role has no existing playbook.
Have a general manager mindset— you can evaluate research directions not just for technical novelty but for commercial viability and customer impact.
Bring a mix of large-company and earlier-stage experience— you understand both the pace of a research lab and the urgency of a startup building a commercial business.
Can influence without authority— researchers don't report to you, but your input on priorities needs to carry weight because it's well-informed and well-reasoned.
What Sets You Apart
Experience as a Research PM, Applied Research PM, or Labs PM at a frontier AI company (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Cohere, Mistral).
Background in multimodal AI— you understand the specific opportunities and challenges of models that work across vision, language, and generation.
Python and SQL proficiency— you can work in the tools researchers use, not just the tools PMs use.
Founder-type experience or background— you've operated at the intersection of technical ambiguity and commercial urgency before.
Domain exposure in marketing, advertising, entertainment, or related verticals where multimodal capabilities have the most immediate commercial application.