Product Owner

ABOUT THE EMPLOYER

Our client is building an AI-powered platform that digitizes, stores, and extracts intelligence from deal jacket documents. Dealers use their platform to cut audit response time from hours to seconds, surface compliance gaps before regulators do, and ask plain-English questions across thousands of deals — and get grounded, cited answers instantly.

This is a foundational domain hire.

We are combining two roles into one founding hire. You will serve as Product Owner in the SAFe sense — owner of the product backlog, voice of the customer, and the person who decides what ships, when, and why. You will also run the engineering team’s day-to-day delivery cadence — standups, sprint planning, unblocking, and keeping a distributed team moving.

You are the connective tissue between what dealerships need and what engineering delivers. You will not be a passive requirements-gatherer, and you will not be a hands-off coordinator. You will be in the work every day: with our pilot customers, with our engineers — including our Senior AI Engineer and Full Stack Engineer — and with our roadmap, turning dealership reality into engineering priorities and turning those priorities into shipped software.

WHAT WILL YOU WORK ON?

• Own the product backlog and roadmap. Translate customer needs and industry shifts into a prioritized backlog. Lead quarterly planning. Write user stories, accept them, and decide what ships, when, and why.

• Be the voice of the dealership. Spend time with pilot customers and the early cohort. Understand their workflows, their pain, their audit exposure, and their economics — and bring that intelligence into every product decision.

• Lead the delivery cadence. Run standups, sprint planning, and retros. Break the roadmap into sprints, track progress, and keep the team unblocked, focused, and moving.

• Guide priorities directly with our Senior AI Engineer and Full Stack Engineer. Be present when trade-offs are made.

• Coordinate a distributed team. Work across time zones with our engineers — including offshore — to keep hand-offs clean, dependencies visible, and momentum high.

• Surface risk early. See problems before they become slippage. Keep the founding team aligned on what’s happening, what’s next, and what’s at risk — without waiting to be asked.

• Stay on top of the industry. Track the FTC, NADA, state DMV changes, DMS roadmaps (Tekion, Reynolds & Reynolds, CDK, Dealertrack), and the competitive landscape. Surface what matters for the roadmap.

• Influence go-to-market. Help our Growth Partners and field operations team understand what to sell, what to demo, and what to position against.

• Own business outcomes. You are accountable for the product delivering measurable value to dealerships — cleaner audits, faster deal jacket retrieval, fewer audit findings, lower risk.

WHAT SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

• 4+ years leading the day-to-day delivery of a software or engineering team — running standups, sprint planning, and backlog management

• Demonstrated product or operational ownership — you have owned a backlog, led a process change, a system rollout, or a similar initiative end to end, and shipped real results against a roadmap

• Comfortable coordinating a distributed and/or offshore engineering team across time zones

• Enough technical fluency to earn engineers’ trust and reason about trade-offs — APIs, data pipelines, cloud, and AI/ML concepts. You do not need to write production code, but you need to speak the language and hold a real conversation about how something should be built

• Strong written and verbal communication — you can write a story, run a meeting, brief an executive, and email a CFO without rework

• You are already using AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Notion AI, or similar) in your daily work, and you want to push that further

ARE THERE ANY OTHER REQUIREMENTS?

• Direct automotive dealership experience

• Formal Product Owner, Scrum, SAFe, or Agile certification or track record

• Working knowledge of at least one major DMS (Tekion, Reynolds & Reynolds, CDK, or Dealertrack)

• Experience shipping AI/ML or document-intelligence products

• Background in compliance, internal audit, or risk — in automotive or an adjacent regulated industry

• Experience working with or selling to multiple rooftops or dealer groups

• Exposure to vendor-side automotive technology (ComplyAuto, KPA, AutoAlert, vAuto, etc.)

12:00-21:00, 5/2, UTC+5