Senior Technical Product Manager

We are hiring a Senior Technical Product Manager to join a small, highly technical, early-stage team working before product-market fit, where every decision matters and nothing is fully defined. You'll lead the discovery and iteration that turns cutting-edge privacy and AI research into products that data owners and data scientists love to use. This role is purpose-built for a hands-on, code-fluent product builder who is mission-driven, comfortable in research-to-product ambiguity, and excited by privacy-preserving computation, federated systems, and emerging AI architectures.

Key Responsibilities

Product Discovery & Delivery

• Drive discovery, experimentation, and delivery to take a flagship open-source product from concept to product-market fit

• Conduct user research and go-to-market experiments to uncover workflows, pain points, and incentives that guide product direction

• Identify the signals that matter — activation, retention, mission alignment — and use them to guide iteration

• Champion the voice of users so deeply technical work stays grounded in real human problems

Technical Product Leadership

• Collaborate closely with engineers and researchers to define, build, and iterate on deeply technical products that unlock new ways to collaborate on private data

• Translate complex systems (privacy-preserving computations, federated architectures, LLM connectors) into intuitive user experiences

• Roll up your sleeves when speed matters — prototype flows, fix bugs, or code alongside the team to accelerate learning

• Bridge research and implementation: turn technical possibilities into practical product directions

Strategy & Communication

• Communicate priorities clearly, aligning a distributed team on near-term execution and long-term mission

• Immerse yourself in the evolving landscape of privacy, AI, and data collaboration to anticipate shifts in technology, incentives, and regulation

• Engage with policy and standards communities to ensure privacy-preserving technologies are adopted responsibly

• Cultivate strategic partnerships with organizations whose data, expertise, or reach can accelerate the mission

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years of product management experience building or scaling technical products, ideally in environments without a clear playbook

• Strong technical foundation with proven experience coding and collaborating closely with engineers to ship complex software

• Ability to reason about distributed systems, privacy technologies, and AI

• Hands-on with code and tooling — able to read PRs, debug, or prototype ideas to help the team move faster

• Strong grasp of the evolving AI landscape: model advances, the shift to agentic systems, full-stack architecture, and key trade-offs impacting product strategy

• Deep curiosity about emerging technologies such as secure computation, RAG, and mixture-of-experts architectures

• Comfort in ambiguity: able to create structure and bring clarity where others see complexity

• Exceptional written and verbal communication; able to align distributed teams and build trust across engineers, researchers, policymakers, and partners

• Mission-driven mindset — you care deeply about how technology shapes society

• Fully fluent in English

• Ability to commit long-term and full-time

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience in early-stage or research-to-product environments

• Experience as a data scientist or building for data scientists (including hands-on with Colab and Jupyter)

• Contributions to open-source projects or standards efforts

• Exposure to or curiosity about public policy, privacy, or technology governance

• Entrepreneurial or founder-like experience, especially where you had to build both product and ecosystem from scratch

• Familiarity with privacy-preserving ML techniques: federated learning, differential privacy, secure multi-party computation (MPC), homomorphic encryption

• Background in nonprofit, academic, or research-driven organizations

Tools & Technologies

• Python (reading, debugging, light prototyping), Jupyter, Colab, Git/GitHub, Linear or Jira, Notion, Figma (basic), Slack, Loom; familiarity with PyTorch or similar ML frameworks (a plus); secure computation / federated learning libraries (a plus); RAG, agentic frameworks, LLM tooling (ChatGPT, Claude, LangChain)

Core Competencies

• Builder at heart who creates clarity rather than waiting for it

• Hands-on technical instincts paired with strong product taste

• Comfortable with messy, early-stage ambiguity

• Mission-driven and energized by impossible-sounding problems

• Strong collaborator with engineers, researchers, policymakers, and partners

• Decisive under uncertainty; iterates quickly on signal

• Curious about the intersection of privacy, AI, and societal impact

• Able to be the public face of the product with technical and non-technical audiences

What We Offer

• Best salaries in the industry

• Work from anywhere permanently

• Opportunities for growth and advancement

• A fast-paced and collaborative environment

• A warm, people-first company culture

• Get paid in your currency of choice

• Full benefits

This is a full-time, long-term role, dedicated exclusively to one of our clients. All roles at Persona are 100% work-from-anywhere. Once hired, we will carefully match you to a client company that best suits your career background, skills, and goals.