Forward Deployed Product Builder

Our client is an early-stage AI company building a new kind of context and intelligence platform for product teams. Their technology brings together the information teams rely on: decisions, customer research, project pipelines, institutional knowledge, and other critical business context, making it accessible to both people and AI agents across the tools where work happens.

Our client is rethinking how products get built in an AI-native world.

As AI dramatically accelerates execution, the boundaries between product, design, and engineering are becoming less defined. Increasingly, the differentiators are judgment, creativity, customer understanding, and the ability to turn ambiguity into something useful.

That philosophy shapes both the product and the team. Rather than operating within narrow functional lanes, team members are expected to think across product, technology, design, and customer experience and take ownership from idea through execution.

About the Role
We're looking for a Forward Deployed Product Engineer / Product Builder to help enterprise customers successfully adopt both the platform and a new way of building products.

This is an unusual role at the intersection of product management, management consulting, customer strategy, change management, and hands-on AI development.

You'll embed with enterprise customers — including large, complex organizations — to understand how their teams currently operate, identify what is slowing them down, integrate the platform into their workflows, and help them fundamentally improve how they build products.

Technology is only part of the challenge. Success also requires navigating organizational dynamics, earning trust, facilitating change, and helping teams adopt new behaviors that stick.

Think of this as a PM or management consultant who also loves to build.

You'll work closely with the founding team, learn a proven methodology for improving product velocity, and take ownership of bringing that methodology to life inside customer organizations.

What You'll Do

Embed with enterprise customers.

Partner closely with product managers, engineering leaders, technical founders, and senior stakeholders to understand how their organizations operate, where work gets stuck, and what is really preventing teams from moving faster.

Turn messy environments into effective systems.

Integrate the platform into each customer's existing decisions, research, knowledge, and work pipelines so teams — and the AI agents supporting them — can operate with better context and greater specificity.

Lead organizational change.

Help teams move away from long-established habits and adopt new ways of working. You'll need to understand resistance, build trust, create internal champions, and drive adoption without creating unnecessary disruption.

Teach and facilitate.

Lead workshops and working sessions that help customers understand not only how to use the technology, but why the underlying methodology works. You'll be comfortable answering hard questions and winning over skeptical audiences.

Build alongside customers.

This isn't a role where you'll simply make recommendations and hand them off. You'll prototype, configure, experiment, and demonstrate solutions yourself.

Bring the customer into the product roadmap.

Translate what you're seeing in the field into clear, actionable product insights. Your exposure to different organizations and use cases will directly influence how the platform evolves.

Drive measurable results.

Ultimately, your work should help customers build better products faster. You'll take ownership of each deployment and work toward demonstrable improvements in adoption, decision-making, and product velocity.

What We're Looking For

You have

strong product management fluency.

You understand product discovery, prioritization, customer research, product velocity, experimentation, and the realities of getting products shipped. More importantly, you've applied these concepts in real organizations.

You bring

consulting-level communication and facilitation skills.

You can read a room, identify the concern that isn't being said out loud, ask thoughtful questions, and help groups move from ambiguity toward decisions.

You have experience with

change management and adoption.

You've introduced a new technology, process, methodology, or way of working into an organization and successfully helped people embrace it.

You're

technically credible and hands-on.

You don't need to come from a traditional software engineering career, but you're comfortable building, prototyping, and working directly with modern technology.

You're genuinely

hands-on with AI development tools.

AI-assisted development is part of your everyday workflow, and you're comfortable experimenting with tools such as Claude, Cursor, and other emerging AI development platforms. You can demonstrate what's possible rather than simply talking about it.

You're comfortable in

enterprise environments.

You can work effectively with everyone from individual contributors to senior executives and navigate complex organizations with multiple stakeholders.

Most importantly, you have a

high-ownership mindset.

When you're responsible for a customer deployment, you treat its success as if your own company's reputation depends on it.

You'll Probably Love This Role If...

You enjoy operating where

product, technology, strategy, and people intersect .

You'd rather solve an ambiguous problem than receive a perfectly defined set of requirements.

You like talking to customers as much as you like building.

You're excited by how AI is changing the way software products are conceived, designed, and shipped.

You enjoy getting something useful into people's hands quickly, learning from it, and improving it.

And you're energized by the opportunity to join an early team where your work can meaningfully influence both the product and the company.

This Role May Not Be the Right Fit If...

You're looking for a traditional Product Manager role with clearly defined functional boundaries.

You prefer extensive structure and fully defined requirements before getting started.

You want to spend most of your time creating strategy or recommendations rather than implementing them.

You're uncomfortable working directly with AI-assisted development tools.

Or you strongly prefer fully remote work.

Why Join?

Shape how AI changes product development.

You'll work on technology designed to give AI systems better product and business context — not simply better coding capabilities.

Work directly with customers.

You'll see firsthand how the product is being used, what works, what doesn't, and where the biggest opportunities lie.

Own meaningful outcomes.

You'll have substantial responsibility for customer deployments rather than owning one narrow piece of a larger process.

Influence the product.

Your experiences in the field will directly inform product priorities and the roadmap.

Help define an emerging category.

The company is exploring what product intelligence and AI-native product development can become, and you'll have an opportunity to help shape that direction from an early stage.

Equity:

0.5%–1.5% early-team equity grant

PTO:

Unlimited

At this time, the company is unable to provide employment visa sponsorship. Candidates must already be authorized to work in the United States.

This is an

in-person role based in San Francisco , with travel to customer offices as needed.

The team operates with a high degree of trust and flexibility, so there may be times when working from home makes sense. However, this is intentionally not a fully remote position. The company believes the speed of the AI market, the collaborative nature of the product, and the customer-facing responsibilities of this role benefit significantly from working together in person.

From Tangerine Search:
Tangerine Search is an equal opportunity agency that values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform crucial job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.

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