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Vals AI is seeking a Founding Product Manager to lead the next phase of growth for Vals Smith, an enterprise product that helps organizations select the best AI model for their use case. The company recently closed a $40M Series A at $400M valuation, backed by Andreessen Horowitz and other top-tier investors.
In this role, you will own the complete product roadmap for Vals Smith, driving the loop between enterprise customer needs and product delivery. You'll conduct discovery directly with design partners and ship changes collaboratively with engineering and design teams, covering onboarding, repository ingestion, results UX, integrations, and demo environments.
You'll serve as the technical counterpart to the Head of Partnerships, participating in customer evaluations and POCs, owning technical scoping conversations with CTOs and Heads of AI, and translating customer feedback into roadmap priorities. You'll build the activation funnel from signup through recurring usage, and play a material role in pricing and packaging strategy, partnering with founders and GTM on credit structures, tiers, and enterprise plans while owning usage instrumentation and analysis.
The ideal candidate has 2+ years in a technical, customer-facing role such as forward-deployed engineer, solutions engineer, technical PM, or ML engineer with customer engagement ownership. You should hold a technical degree (CS, EE, math) with prior IC engineering experience. You'll write code to scope evaluations, run experiments with customer data, and build prototypes—though not shipping the core platform. Demonstrated ability to lead technical engagements end-to-end from initial CTO conversation through delivered evaluation is essential. Strong written and verbal communication is critical for credibility with senior buyers.
The company was founded by Stanford NLP researchers and includes team members from NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, and Jane Street. The founding team has 300+ citations in published work and includes Stanford PhDs and the first designer at Snorkel. Vals Smith is used by major foundation model labs, large financial institutions, and hospital systems.
The role requires in-person presence in San Francisco, with relocation support provided. The company offers competitive salary with meaningful equity, full health/dental/vision coverage, lunch and dinner, 401K, unlimited PTO, and a $1,500 housing stipend.
