Head of Product

Location: Nashville, TN (in person, 3 days a week).

Compensation: $200K-$250K (OTE DOE) + meaningful equity

Reports to: Founder & CEO

tl;dr

We’re hiring a Head of Product to own how our roadmap gets built, shipped, and adopted. You’ll shape the product strategy and work with our CEO on the biggest bets while managing the day‑to‑day. As an AI‑forward company, you’ll be hands‑on with real authority for how we build and how we deliver. You’ll help us navigate a world where Product can not only define the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ but also the ‘how.’ We’ll lean on you to deliver the translation of big ideas and bets into sequenced build plans, clear specs, and frequent product releases.

What is Edgevanta?

Edgevanta builds pricing intelligence and AI agents that help heavy civil contractors estimate and bid work faster and more accurately. Our Founder and CEO is a 4th generation contractor who worked in the business most of his life before starting the company.

Contractors use Edgevanta to study competitor bids across all 50 state DOTs, forecast unit prices, track the margin they capture, and analyze large bid packages (plans, specs, and forms). We work with top contractors like C.W. Matthews, Barnhill, and Emery Sapp & Sons.

Our goal is to become the mission critical platform for preconstruction in heavy civil: every bid package goes into Edgevanta, agents do the work with a human in the loop, and the whole bid gets built there.

The problem we're solving

A complex highway bid takes about four weeks, often with two to three people working on it full time. A typical workflow involves reading plans and specs, takeoffs (measuring and counting material quantities from project plans), creating cost estimates, sorting out sub contractor and supplier quotes, and researching prices. Pricing intelligence alone is a grind.

The pool of people who do this work are shrinking. More than 150,000 people estimate civil work in the US, and 40% of the construction workforce will retire in the next seven years. Estimators are retiring faster than they're being replaced, and new ones are hard to train. It's a $15B labor problem.

We think AI can help with the tidal wave of retirements all the while taking those four weeks down to a few minutes, with an estimator in the loop. It succeeds when the agents do the manual work correctly, show their work instead of acting as a black box, and let the estimator override anything. Done right, contractors build for less, estimating stops being the constraint on how much they can bid, and estimators get home earlier and spend more time on job sites. Every road, bridge, tunnel, and site development you drive through was estimated and built by somebody. We are deeply passionate about improving this process so that our country’s infrastructure is rebuilt as efficiently as possible by these hard working folks.

Why are we hiring this role?

We ship fast and our roadmap is ambitious: document review, roll plots, takeoffs, and eventually the full estimate. The constraint is no longer ideas. It's sequencing, scope, and getting customers onto new workflows once they ship.

Today the CEO carries both the vision and the day‑to‑day product decisions. We need someone who, initially, owns the second half: deciding what gets built in what order, writing the specs, holding the dates, and making sure what ships get used. We’re looking for someone comfortable owning the roadmap, collaborating with multiple stakeholders, and pushing back constructively when scopes or timelines don’t hold up.

What you'll do

• Own the roadmap: one plan, organized by what matters most, with release dates
• Spend real time with estimators, chief estimators, and VPs. Watch how they bid today and bring it back into the product
• Become the voice of the customer that enables writing specs clear enough that engineering can build with confidence
• Run planning with our engineering manager. Engineering owns how things get built; you own what and in what order
• Run the release cadence and plan launches with customer success
• Own adoption and collaborate with customer success: weekly active users, seat utilization, and whether customers move onto new workflows
• Protect the team's focus. New requests come through you and get weighed against the roadmap
• Own the release process: write acceptance criteria, work with engineering on test coverage, and decide when a feature is ready for customers
• Build out and manage the product team as we go starting with our product designer

What does a typical week look like?

The mix shifts with releases and customer needs, but a typical week might look like:

• 40% with engineering: planning, specs, unblocking decisions, reviewing what's about to ship
• 25% with customers: discovery calls, site visits, watching estimators work a bid, testing new workflows with them
• 20% on roadmap and priorities: sequencing, scoping, and tradeoff calls with the CEO
• 15% on launches and adoption: release notes and usage reviews with customer success

How technical is this role?

You won't write production code, but you need to go deep. You'll work with AI agents, document processing, OCR, evals, and pricing data every day. You should be able to read a bid package, judge whether an agent's output is right, and talk through tradeoffs with engineers in detail. Success looks like joining customer discovery calls and being able to wear multiple hats during the discussion.

How we work

We ship every day and publish a changelog every week. Read a few entries to see the pace and what we're building.

We're an AI-native company. The team uses AI tools daily for research, writing, analysis, and building, and you should too.

Who will I work with day to day?

You'll report directly to our Founder & CEO, Tristan Wilson , and work closely with:

What does success look like in the first 6 months?

• One roadmap the whole company works from, with a planning process the team trusts and delivery speed that improves quarter over quarter
• Most active customers are working their bids in the new document review workflow
• You've set adoption targets for weekly active users and seat utilization, and you're hitting them
• Roll plots and asphalt takeoffs are specced with at least 3 customer design partners and in build
• 10+ customer discovery sessions a month, with findings written up and tied to roadmap decisions

What we're looking for

Required

• 7+ years in product, including 3+ leading product at a B2B software company
• You've shipped workflow software that professionals use daily and can show the adoption numbers you moved
• You've built or worked closely on AI products: LLM features, agents, or document processing
• You write clear specs and work closely with engineers, including remote teams
• Can turn a founder's product vision into a plan, and you'll tell us when the plan should change
• Construction or estimating experience is a plus, not a requirement. We'll teach you the domain
• Vertical SaaS sold into field‑heavy industries

Why you might not want this job

• The CEO makes the final call on the biggest bets. You'll shape strategy and own the roadmap, but if you need to own the product vision outright today, this isn't the seat
• It's hands‑on. Your days are specs, sequencing, tradeoffs, and getting releases out the door. You'll spend more time with engineers and estimators than in strategy reviews
• You'll start with a small team. One product designer reports to you on day one. You'll still write the specs yourself, and the team grows as you prove the function
• The pace is fast. We ship every day. Plans change when customers tell us something new
• It's in person in Nashville. Expect up to two weeks of travel a quarter, including customer site visits with estimators and team offsites
• Real traction. We've nearly tripled ARR in the last 12 months, with contractors like C.W. Matthews and Barnhill on the platform and new customers coast to coast
• A hard problem worth solving. Turn a four-week bid into a few minutes of estimator review, for an industry losing its estimators faster than it can replace them
• A product that ships with craft. We release every day. Your decisions show up in customers' hands within days, not quarters. Quality is integral to everything we do
• An insider founder. Tristan is a fourth‑generation contractor with 13 years in the field and writes a newsletter read by thousands of civil construction professionals. You'll have direct access to how estimators think and to the customers themselves
• Room to grow. You'll build the product function. As we grow, this role leads the product team
• Meaningful equity. Meaningful ownership in what you help build. We’ve raised very little capital to-date, we’re very capital efficient, and we think that adds to our value
• 25 paid days off a year (18 days PTO + 7 company holidays)
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) plan
• Unlimited book club budget

About the interview

We respond within 24 hours at every stage. You don’t need a construction background for any of it. We’ll give you the context you need, and we leave time for your questions at every step.

Intro call (45 min): a conversation with our CEO about your background and what you’re looking for in your next role.

Writing exercise: pick a software product you use and write a one‑page spec for a workflow you’d improve. Send it to us before the deep dive.

Deep dive (60 min): we’ll start with your spec: the tradeoffs, what you cut, and what you’d test first. Then we’ll go deep on products you owned: the problem, the calls you made, and what you learned. We’re looking for clear thinking, good scoping, and real ownership.

Customer call (45 min): you’ll run a discovery call with a team member playing a customer. We’ll send a short brief beforehand. We’re looking at how you ask questions and find the real problem, not how much you know about construction.

Nashville visit (half‑day): for finalists. You’ll meet the team and run a live roadmap review. We’ll give you our current priorities and a backlog, and you’ll sequence it, cut scope, and walk us through your plan. It’s also your chance to see how we work and decide if this is the right fit. We cover all costs.

Throughout, we’re asking: would we trust this person to own what gets built and shipped?