Product Manager

Job description

THE ONE-LINE VERSION You'll be the first product management hire, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the CEO to build the AI execution layer for recruiting - and you'll treat this like the last job you'll have before starting your own company. ABOUT US candidate.fyi http://candidate.fyi is the AI-native hiring execution layer, powering the hiring experience for some of the most innovative and largest organizations in the world. We're a lean, capital-efficient team building a suite of AI agents that are redefining what hiring looks like at scale. We ship fast, we make decisions quickly, and we're allergic to bloat. This role reflects that. WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS We’re building at a pace that requires a second brain. The CEO is in the product every single day and needs a true partner, not a delegate. You won’t inherit a stale roadmap or a backlog to groom-you’ll be in the trenches alongside the CEO, shaping strategy, obsessing over details, and shipping the features that define our category. This is a seat for a builder, not a process manager. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own product areas end to end: from the messy problem, through the design, to the shipped feature and its adoption - Work extremely closely with the CEO on strategy, prioritization, and the hard calls - you'll be in the room for the decisions that matter - Write specs, prototypes, and PRDs that engineers actually want to build from, and sit with the team through implementation - Talk to enterprise customers directly, turn what you hear into product bets, and close the loop - Prototype your own ideas fast - get a working thing in front of real users to pressure-test a bet before we commit engineering to it - Use AI relentlessly in your own workflow - for research, prototyping, spec-writing, analysis - and bring that instinct into the products we build WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR You're obsessed with building product. Not the ceremony of PM - the actual craft of figuring out what to build and making it real. You have opinions about products you use and you can't help improving them in your head. You're technical. You've written code, even if it's not your day job anymore. You understand how the pieces fit together - APIs, data models, what's cheap vs. expensive to build - so engineers trust you and you can prototype your own ideas. You want to be a founder. This is a feature, not a bug. We want someone who's using this as the training ground for the company they'll start one day - because that person operates with ownership, urgency, and taste that you can't hire for any other way. You have design sense. You know good design when you see it and you're not satisfied until the thing feels right. You can push back on a mediocre UI and articulate why. You live in AI. You use it every day, you know where it's good and where it breaks, and you have real intuition for building products on top of models - not just bolting a chatbot onto a form. THE BASELINE - 3+ years of professional experience - ideally with real ownership of a product area from idea to launch - Hands-on with v0, Replit, Cursor, or similar modern prototyping and dev tools - you can go from idea to working prototype in an afternoon BONUS POINTS This is a picture of someone who'd thrive here. Strong candidates will bring some of these; the rare ones bring most. - You've shipped with AI, not just talked about it. Real tools, workflows, or prototypes you built yourself - and a clear mental model for where AI improves a workflow vs. where it just adds noise. - You know enterprise B2B. Multi-stakeholder buying, implementation complexity, and what actually drives retention aren't new to you. - Recruiting or HR tech is in your background - or you're genuinely fired up to go deep on it. - You have craft. You sweat the workflow details, partner well with designers, and use data to challenge your assumptions rather than just confirm them. WHAT MAKES YOU A FIT FOR US SPECIFICALLY - You'd rather ship and learn than analyze and wait - You give and take direct feedback without drama - You're energized, not intimidated, by working this closely with a founder - Enterprise B2B and the unglamorous-but-huge problem of hiring coordination genuinely interests you WHY CANDIDATE.FYI - Real traction. We power hiring for enterprise customers like Coreweave, Zendesk, and and Yelp across a lean, capital-efficient business. Real revenue, real customers, no hype. - Huge surface area. A whole suite of AI agents and a category being defined in real time. You'll own something meaningful from day one - the opposite of a rounding-error role at a big company. - A genuine AI bet. We're building AI-native, not AI-bolted-on. You'll help decide what that actually means in product. - Founder proximity. You'll work directly with the CEO on the decisions that matter - the highest-leverage seat in the company for someone who wants to learn how to build one. - Operator pace. Small team, fast decisions, high trust. What you ship is live in front of customers, not stuck in a roadmap review. BENEFITS - Equity - Health insurance - Flexible time off - Remote-friendly