Product Manager, Austin TX

Kainoa
Aqui

Building enterprise AI and security products at IBM. From Kaimuki, Honolulu. Built across ML research, cloud infrastructure, and automotive systems.

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Kainoa Aqui, Product Manager at IBM
Worked at

Background

The arc

From Kaimuki, Honolulu to IBM's enterprise product team, the path ran through federal research labs, Amazon's cloud infrastructure, and Tesla's automation pipelines. Not a straight line. Not a handed opportunity. Built one move at a time.

I'm a PM who started in ML. That means I understand what engineers are building, how models behave in production, and where the actual complexity lives, not just what's written in the requirements doc. I ship with cross-functional teams across engineering, UX, sales, legal, and executive leadership.

Currently: Product Owner for IBM Sterling Secure Proxy and Sterling External Authentication Server, enterprise security products protecting sensitive B2B file transfers for some of the largest organizations in the world, within a $500M+ portfolio.

$500M+ Portfolio Revenue
200+ Stakeholders Presented To
50+ Enterprise Customers Engaged

Career

Experience

2026, Present
IBM
Product Manager
IBM, Austin TX
Product Owner for IBM Sterling Secure Proxy and Sterling External Authentication Server within the $500M+ Sterling Data Exchange portfolio. Own the end-to-end roadmap across engineering, UX, sales, legal, and global stakeholders. Drove Customer Advisory Council outreach engaging 50+ enterprise customers on agentic AI use cases. Led roadmap sessions for 200+ attendees across enterprise clients and IBM's global sales org.
Product Roadmap Enterprise B2B GTM Strategy Agentic AI Executive Comms
IBM Sterling Secure Proxy ↗
Fall 2025
Tesla
AI Automation, Technical Writer
Tesla
Contributed to Tesla's Service Portal by externalizing 150+ repair procedures and building a 7-stage automation pipeline to streamline the document review and publishing workflow for third-party technicians and customers. Replaced a fully manual process and delivered well ahead of scope.
LLM Pipelines Python Automation Technical Writing Content Systems
Tesla Service Portal ↗
Summer 2025
AWS
Machine Learning, Technical Writer
Amazon Web Services, SageMaker AI
Built and published the SageMaker AI JumpStart Model Evaluation Framework in the official Amazon SageMaker Developer Guide, a complete open-source toolkit enabling AWS customers to deploy, evaluate, and compare ML models across balanced, skewed, and challenging datasets. 7 core modules, 2 Jupyter notebooks, production-ready auto-scaling with CloudWatch monitoring.
SageMaker Python ML Evaluation Technical Documentation Published
View in AWS Developer Guide ↗
Summer 2024
NSF
Machine Learning Researcher
National Science Foundation, Grant No. 2244371
Co-authored research on poisoning attack mitigation for federated learning under NSF Grant No. 2244371. Developed a cosine similarity-based defense using functional encryption to filter malicious model updates while preserving contributor privacy, achieving consistent reduction in attack success rates across Label Flip, Noise, Scaling, and Shift attacks.
Federated Learning Security Research Published Research Python Functional Encryption
View Research Poster ↗

Get in Touch

Contact

Open to conversations about product, AI, enterprise software, and what comes next.

LinkedIn
Kainoa Aqui
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Email
kaqui.official@gmail.com
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