# Principal Product Builder **Level:** Principal IC ยท L7 equivalent **Team:** Product **Reports to:** Chief Product Officer or CEO **Type:** Full-time **Location:** Remote with significant overlap with executive team. Travel as needed. --- ## The Short Version This is the most senior individual contributor role in the product organization. You will set the product strategy for one of our most consequential pillars. You will define the company-wide standards for how we ship AI products. You will ship the systems that the rest of the org will be measured against. And you will do it while serving as the most credible product voice in the room with engineering, design, and the executive team. We are not looking for a Director who wants to drop into IC work. We are looking for a builder who has chosen to operate at company-shaping scale without managing people, and who has the body of work to back it up. --- ## What You Will Actually Do - **Set the strategy for a flagship pillar.** You define what we build, why, in what order, and against what success criteria. The CPO and CEO use your strategy as the basis for company-level commitments. - **Define the AI product standards for the company.** Prototyping practice, evaluation requirements, observability gates, deprecation criteria, model migration playbooks, agent-fleet architecture. You write the bar. - **Ship the flagship systems.** When the most strategic, hardest AI system in the company needs to be designed and shipped, you are in the room and at the keyboard. You are not above building. - **Mentor Staff and Senior Builders.** You run deep design reviews. You raise the technical and product bar across pillars. You are the person Staff Builders go to when they are stuck. - **Influence the company.** You partner directly with CTO, CEO, design leadership, and finance on the unit economics, the technology bets, and the product strategy that defines the next two to three years. - **Be a public voice.** Your work and your point of view show up externally: at industry events, in writing, in technical discussions with customers and partners. You shape how the market thinks about AI products in our category. --- ## What We Are Looking For ### Must-haves - 12+ years in product, with at least 5 years shipping AI-powered products in production - A portfolio of flagship AI systems you personally led from zero to scale, including model and architecture choices - A track record of setting standards that other teams adopted, whether that's an eval framework, a prompt-ops practice, an observability layer, or a platform pattern - Demonstrated ability to operate as the most credible product voice in a room of senior engineers, designers, and executives - The ability to make a strategic call that holds up across a model generation change, a market shift, and a leadership change - Operating range that goes from a whiteboard with the CEO to a Cursor session shipping a prototype before lunch ### Strong signal - You have published, open-sourced, or spoken publicly about AI product work, and people in the field can name what you built - You have led the product side of an org-wide migration, retirement, or repositioning that depended on AI - You have hired, calibrated, and grown the careers of Staff and Senior Builders in your previous companies, even as an IC - You have a defensible, opinionated point of view about how AI products should be built that you have refined over multiple cycles ### Not required - Direct people-management background (this is a Principal IC role, not a Director role) - A specific industry vertical - A formal computer science degree --- ## What You Will Not Do - Run a backlog - Manage managers - Operate at one level of abstraction. The job requires moving fluidly between pillar strategy and a specific eval failure mode in the same day. - Stop building. The day you stop shipping prototypes is the day this role ends. --- ## How We Work Paired product-engineering ownership across the org. Prototypes in hours. Evals on day one. Standards owned by the most senior Builders. You will set the operating norms for an entire pillar and you will expected to live by them yourself. This is a high-trust, high-accountability role with company-shaping scope. --- ## Compensation and Benefits - Top-of-band base salary at the principal IC level - Substantial equity grant - Direct partnership with the executive team - Conference, research, advisory, and learning budget commensurate with the role - Flexibility to publish, speak, and contribute externally where it serves the company --- ## How to Apply Skip the cover letter. Instead, send us: 1. **One flagship AI system or product line you led from zero to scale.** Architecture, scope, role, outcomes, the part that almost killed it. 2. **One company-level standard you set** that other teams adopted. The problem it solved and how it held up over time. 3. **Your point of view on where AI products are heading in our category** and what we should be building toward in the next 24 months. One page or one diagram is enough. We will respond to every submission that includes all three.