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.

View Work LinkedIn ↗
Kainoa Aqui, Product Manager at IBM
Worked at
IBM Tesla AWS NSF

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
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
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
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
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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