Ali A. Malik
Product Manager (AI)
Summary
Product leader with 5+ years building AI, SaaS, and data products from 0→1 and at scale, turning complex technical systems into commercial products across frontier AI, consumer platforms, and enterprise software. Built the big-data and NLP platforms behind Trufan Analytics at Surf, shipped design-to-code AI tooling at Tempo (YC '23) that cut development cycles by 40%, and now builds the trust layer for AI agents and models at Sapien. Track record leading product, design, and engineering teams, owning roadmaps and go-to-market, and shipping at scale for clients like Amazon, EA, Logitech, and Riot Games.
Work Experience
Senior Product Manager
Sapien · Full-time
Oct 2025 – Present
Toronto, CA
- Led product for Sapien's AI evaluation platform, building infrastructure that enables human feedback and quality assurance for frontier model development.
- Scaled expert evaluation operations through annotation and RLHF tooling used by thousands of contributors to assess safety, reasoning quality, and output accuracy.
- Defined product requirements at the intersection of ML research and engineering, operationalizing model alignment objectives into measurable evaluation workflows.
- Influenced product positioning and commercialization efforts around AI trust and safety, strengthening Sapien's role in the emerging responsible AI stack.
- Executed 120+ discovery and go-to-market interviews to validate market demand, identify ICPs, and inform strategic roadmap decisions.
- Shipped a gamified onboarding experience that improved evaluator activation and accelerated progression through the contribution funnel.
AI Product Manager
Tempo (YC '23) · Contract
Dec 2024 – Oct 2025
Toronto, CA
- Managed 20+ concurrent client projects from planning to go-to-market, shipping 1–3 features weekly through AI-driven workflows, agile sprints, and roadmap ownership.
- Launched 6 custom web apps from scratch, leveraging AI code generation and rapid prototyping to compress delivery timelines by 40%.
- Integrated eCommerce tools (Stripe, BigCommerce, Odoo) and headless CMS systems (Sanity) to build scalable, modular platforms via AI-assisted pipelines.
- Led 8 developers and 6 designers across fast-paced product cycles, embedding AI copilots into daily workflows to accelerate design-to-code handoff.
- Built an AI-powered feature tracker to centralize client feedback, increase roadmap visibility, and streamline delivery tracking.
Senior Product Manager
Surf · Acquired by Datacy · Full-time
Jan 2023 – Dec 2024
Toronto, CA
- Led two agile teams across three SaaS products (B2C/B2B/B2M), supporting 700K+ users with NLP-driven analytics and data intelligence features.
- Managed high-profile client portfolio, running data-driven marketing and sweepstakes campaigns for Amazon, EA, Logitech, and Riot Games (average deal ~$1.5M).
- Increased active users by 35% through behavioral analytics and predictive modeling-powered campaigns.
- Owned product roadmaps across 34 sprints, shipping 70+ features with 65–80% sprint predictability.
Product Manager
Trufan · Acquired by Surf · Full-time
Sep 2020 – Dec 2022
Toronto, CA
- Led tech stack migration from Elixir/Rails to Node.js; scoped feature sets, wrote the dev roadmap, and launched new release cycles.
- Led 6-person team to build and launch two B2C SaaS platforms: Trufan Analytics (NLP-powered Instagram/Twitter/web data processing) and a Giveaways Platform, serving 500K+ users.
- Launched a web dashboard aggregating live data from 120K+ Google Extension users, building SQL-based insights and NLP-driven audience intelligence dashboards.
- Built data marketplace integrations (Snowflake, Liveramp, Eagle Alpha) for downstream NLP analytics, audience segmentation, and activation.
Core Skills
Product Management · AI/ML Product Strategy · LLM & AI Agent Workflows · Product Design & UX · Rapid Prototyping · Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy · Market & Customer Discovery · Roadmap & Prioritization · Agile (Scrum & Kanban) · Cross-Functional Team Leadership
Tools & Technologies
Jira · Figma · OpenAI · Claude · LangChain · LangGraph · n8n · Snowflake · LiveRamp · SQL · Node.js · Elixir · Ruby on Rails · Next.js · Photoshop · Illustrator · Excel
Education
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Bachelor's Degree, Business
Languages
English (Fluent) · French (Intermediate) · Urdu (Fluent)