Product Manager

What you'll do

• Work with the founders, engineers, and researchers to turn Alpha Z’s capabilities into a practical, usable product.
• Translate user problems into clear requirements, user flows, prototypes, and acceptance criteria.
• Work with the founders and technical lead to prioritize the product backlog, define milestones and acceptance criteria, track dependencies and blockers, and drive agreed features through development, testing, and release.
• Define AI product workflows withresearchers and engineers, specifying inputs, outputs, user interactions, validation requirements, and failure handling across problem understanding, optimization modeling, solver execution, and result interpretation.
• Work with researchers and engineers to define representative test cases and validate complete user workflows before release.
• Run pilot testing with students and researchers, observe how they complete key tasks, and use feedback and usage evidence to prioritize improvements in reliability and usability.

What we look for

• Practical experience formulating and solving optimization problems through academic, research, or industry projects.
• Strong execution and attention to detail: able to turn ambiguous ideas into clear tasks and follow through to delivery.
• Experience building or prototyping AI-enabled workflows, with an understanding of tool use, human review, failure handling, and output validation.
• Technical fluency to work closely with engineers, understand APIs and data flows, and use Python for basic analysis or prototyping.
• Clear communication and product judgment, with an ability to make complex technical workflows understandable to users.
• Experience building software or AI prototypes, with attention to testing and output validation. Experience with LLM APIs and tool-using AI workflows is a strong advantage.
• Ideally 1–3 years of relevant experience. Recent graduates with strong project experience are welcome; prior product management experience is not required.