Forward Deployed Product Manager

Job description

ABOUT US Higharc is a VC-backed startup that is changing how new homes are designed and built. Join a founding team who’ve shipped products for Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Nike, and Apple. We have raised over $175M with support from top-notch venture capital firms and more than 18 strategic investors—industry leaders in construction, building products manufacturing, and distribution. Higharc is seeking a hands-on Forward Deployed Product Manager to turn a large production homebuilder's unstructured plan catalog into structured, queryable product data. This is a founding role on a brand-new Forward Deployed team. WHAT YOU'LL DO A homebuilder's plan library is the product data behind its entire business, and at enterprise scale that data is almost entirely unstructured. Plans live as drawing sets scattered across semi-autonomous divisions, renamed and re-numbered as they move. Nobody can say with confidence which plans are duplicates, how many versions of a given home exist, or what actually varies between them. Higharc converts those catalogs into structured, queryable plan data and builds the analysis on top of it: searchable plan libraries with agent-enabled natural-language search, geometric similarity scoring that surfaces plans which have forked under different names, structured mapping of what varies across a library, and classification that makes consolidation decisions possible. You'll own what gets built in the field, working embedded alongside our Forward Deployed Engineers and in partnership with the homebuilder to turn plans into actionable data. This is a role for someone who wants to be close to where the problem lives. Higharc is fully remote; you can sit anywhere in the continental U.S., with travel to client sites and company events up to 30% of the time. Expect to: - Embed with HQ, regional, and division teams to run discovery—locate plan assets, establish source of truth, and document how each division represents its plans and where variation originates. - Own product definition for the searchable plan library, analytics dashboard, and agent-enabled search—what a good query looks like, what a useful answer looks like, and what "structured for analysis" actually means. - Tune Higharc's Autotranslate AI to identify, categorize, and translate floorplans into data. - Work hands-on with the data: query the structured plan library directly, build against our internal APIs, and ship working capability back to users rather than filing a ticket and waiting. - Define acceptance criteria for delivery milestones—coverage targets, data-field completeness, QA error thresholds—and hold the line on them when schedule pressure argues otherwise. - Frame and defend quantifiable ROI: redundancy across a catalog, dimensional spread on repeated conditions, consolidation candidates, and the purchasing leverage each one represents. - Partner with Forward Deployed Engineering, the Technical Lead, QA, Intake Specialists, and Client Strategy, and present progress and tradeoffs to executive stakeholders. - Capture the playbooks, artifacts, and data patterns that let the forward deployed model carry over to the next engagement. ABOUT YOU You're a product manager who is happiest closest to the customer, and you've learned that the fastest path to the right answer is usually to go look. You're comfortable being handed a scope that is 70% specified and a data set nobody has structured before. You can hold a conversation with an architect about how a plan set is drawn in the morning and write the query that tests your hypothesis about it in the afternoon. You know the difference between a demo and a deliverable, and you're honest with customers about which one they're looking at. You have: - 5+ years of product management experience, including significant time in customer-facing or deployed settings—enterprise implementations, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or professional services. - Hands-on technical fluency: you write SQL, work in notebooks, script against APIs, and interrogate a data set yourself rather than requesting a pull. - Experience prototyping to validate ideas quickly using tools like Cursor, Replit, or V0.dev http://V0.dev. - A track record defining structured data models, taxonomies, or classification schemes and getting a business to actually adopt them. - Strong judgment about data quality—what level of accuracy a decision requires, and what it costs to get there. - Excellent written and verbal communication, including with executive stakeholders who have limited time and no patience for status without substance. - Willingness to travel to client sites and company events up to 30% of the time. A major plus if you also bring: - Background in residential construction, homebuilding, architecture, or AEC technology—especially fluency with plan sets, elevations, options, and how builders manage plan variation. - Experience with agent-based or natural-language search over structured data, RAG systems, or LLM-powered analytics. - Exposure to geometric or spatial data—CAD/BIM, computer vision on drawings, similarity and clustering methods. - Experience with large, messy, enterprise-scale data migrations or ingestion programs. - Experience building a function from zero: first hire into a new team, new practice, or new delivery model. WORKING AT HIGHARC Higharc has been remote first since our founding in 2018. We offer flexible hours so you can do your best work without missing out on life. Higharc offers competitive salaries with significant equity, in a fast-growing, well-funded company. Personal healthiness is an important value for us- we provide comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, with flexible PTO, and meaningful maternity/paternity leave to all U.S based employees that are full-time. You'll also have access to other big-company benefits such like short and long-term disability plans and a 401K. Haven't worked remotely before? We provide a stipend to create the ideal home office. Please note: we are seeing an uptick of fraudulent recruiting activity claiming to be associated with Higharc. All communication and outreach from our in-house team will come from an @higharc.com email address.