# Staff Product Builder **Level:** Staff IC ยท L6 equivalent **Team:** Product **Reports to:** Principal Product Builder, VP Product, or Chief Product Officer **Type:** Full-time **Location:** Remote (Global). Overlap with company HQ required. --- ## The Short Version We are looking for a Staff Builder PM to set the technical and product bar for how this company ships AI products. You will own a pillar of the product, shape the cross-team architecture of our AI systems, and define the practices around prototyping, evaluation, and observability that every other Builder PM operates within. You are the person who decides how a workflow should be designed, what a production AI system should look like, and when we need to invest in platform versus ship a point solution. This is the role for a builder who can hold a full pillar in their head, ship flagship AI systems themselves, and raise the craft of the entire product org at the same time. --- ## What You Will Actually Do - **Own a product pillar.** Multiple product areas, multiple Builder PMs feeding in. You are accountable for outcomes across the pillar, not a single feature. - **Design the AI system architecture.** You decide how agents, retrieval, memory, and evaluation layers compose across products. You define the shared primitives we build on. You decide when to standardize and when to fork. - **Set the evaluation and observability standards.** Every AI product in the pillar meets a baseline of evals, drift monitoring, and production observability that you define. You are the person who can answer, with data, "is our AI getting better or worse this month?" - **Ship the flagship systems yourself.** You are a builder, not an overseer. When something strategic needs to get prototyped in a weekend, you are the one who does it. - **Shape unit economics at the pillar level.** You model cost per task, cost per user, latency budgets, and the tradeoff curves that determine pricing and scalability. - **Mentor Senior and Product Builders.** You run deep reviews, pair on hard architecture calls, and help the next layer of Builders step into Staff-scope problems. - **Influence the roadmap.** You are in the room when pillar-level priorities are decided and you are expected to have a strong, defensible point of view. --- ## What We Are Looking For ### Must-haves - 9+ years in a product role, with 4+ years shipping AI-powered products in production - A portfolio of production AI systems you personally designed and shipped, with clear evidence of scale, reliability, and unit economics - Deep expertise in agentic architectures, retrieval, prompt ops, evaluation systems, and drift monitoring - Experience setting technical bar for other PMs and the ability to lead through craft, not authority - Track record of making cross-team architecture decisions that held up over time - The ability to explain AI system tradeoffs to engineering leadership, design leadership, and a CFO in the same meeting ### Strong signal - You have built an internal platform or set of primitives that other product teams use - You have owned a model migration, a major prompt refactor, or a production incident that taught the org something - You have published, open-sourced, or spoken publicly about AI product work - You have been a tech-lead equivalent on a product surface, with engineering leaders who would work with you again ### Not required - Direct people management (this is an IC role) - Large-company tenure - A computer science degree --- ## What You Will Not Do - Manage managers - Sit at the top of a handoff chain - Run the roadmap as a planning exercise decoupled from working prototypes - Let the pillar accumulate technical debt in the evaluation and observability layers --- ## How We Work Paired product-engineering ownership. Prototypes in hours. Evals on day one. Staff Builders set norms. You will have significant autonomy and significant accountability, and you will be expected to make decisions that other people will build against for years. --- ## Compensation and Benefits - Top-of-band base salary at the staff IC level - Significant equity - Remote-first, async-friendly team with overlap requirements for this role - A seat at the table for pillar-level strategy - Learning, conference, and research budget aligned with the seniority of the role --- ## How to Apply Skip the cover letter. Instead, send us: 1. **One production AI system you designed and shipped**, including architecture diagram, scale, and the cost-and-latency profile. 2. **The evaluation and observability layer** you built or specified around it. How you catch regressions today. 3. **One cross-team call you made** that other people were building against six months later. Short description of the tradeoff you weighed and what you decided. We will respond to every submission that includes all three.