Founding Manager Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

About Solidroad
Building something great is addictive. It's like discovering your favorite TV show mid-season, except you're helping write the next episode. It's like unboxing a new gadget, except you're the one designing it. You shape how it feels, how it works, and how people react when they use it.
At Solidroad we're solving a big, messy, exciting problem: how do you scale customer support without losing what makes humans amazing? Warmth, empathy, intuition. We're using AI, generative tech, and real-time simulations to make this happen. It's ambitious, difficult, and genuinely new.
About the role
We're hiring our first Product Manager, and we mean "founding" literally. Today, product lives with our founders, and you'll work directly alongside them, finding how we understand, frame, and solve customer problems and turn our company direction into clean, well-scoped work our engineering pods can run with. This is not a traditional PM role where you sit between everyone and become the bottleneck; engineers here own outcomes, and we want a PM who makes them stronger, not one who recreates a ticket factory.
We're looking for someone who sees this role as more than just a job. It should feel like signing up for a job and a hobby. Or a job and a triathlon. Or a job and an advanced strategy course. You'll shape our product decisions, own major parts of our roadmap, coach the people around you, and push yourself in ways you might not expect. There will be challenging moments, but also regular moments of genuine "wow, we built that" pride.
What you'll actually do day-to-day
Own the roadmap within your product stream
Drive roadmap delivery end-to-end: from ambiguous customer problem to shaped, scoped work with explicit trade-offs, clear success metrics, and a crisp definition of done. You'll apply and evolve our Shape Up-inspired product methodology.
Translate direction into clean engineering boundaries
Take company strategy and turn it into problems engineers can fully own. You'll create cohesion across streams and offices, tight loops between San Francisco and Dublin, so everyone knows why the work matters and what winning looks like.
Live with customers
Run user research, sit in on customer calls, watch real conversations flow through the product, and bring that insight back as sharper framing. Our product handles thousands of customer conversations daily; you'll make sure we're building the right things for the people in them.
Own customer analytics, qualitative and quantitative
Blend the numbers with the narrative. You'll define the metrics that matter, dig into product usage and customer data to spot patterns, opportunities, and friction, and pair that with what you're hearing directly from customers. When we debate what to build next, you'll be the person who brings evidence, not just opinion.
Coach and multiply
Wear multiple hats: coach engineers on product thinking, support design and GTM, and raise the bar for how product work gets done at Solidroad. You make the people around you force multipliers.
Our Team & Culture
We're a team of 30+ people across Dublin and San Francisco. This role is based full-time in our San Francisco office, five days a week, because building something ambitious means collaborating closely, solving problems together, sharing ideas spontaneously, and occasionally challenging each other to padel matches, cold plunges, or karaoke evenings. We're intentional about creating a culture that's mature, supportive, and fun. You'll be joining experienced founders who've done this before, alongside a tight-knit team genuinely excited about building something impactful.
We hope you

• Have at least 6 years of product experience, ideally at a startup (Series A to C) or a design-conscious B2B company, where you've helped ship complex, customer-facing products that real people love using.
• Are as comfortable in the data as you are in customer conversations: defining metrics, analyzing product usage, and turning qualitative and quantitative signals into decisions.
• Bring strong product leadership at a senior staff or principal level: owning significant product areas from concept to launch, driving roadmaps, and leading through influence rather than authority.
• Have deep comfort with AI products, high-ownership engineering cultures, and modern product methods; bonus points if you've worked on notable or challenging products we can explore together.

The good, the bad, and the honest truth
The highs here are incredibly high, direct collaboration with founders who've done this before, significant ownership, and a product you'll feel deeply proud of. The lows are that you'll need to move fast, navigate ambiguity, and sometimes tackle tough product problems solo. But the reality is that startups are a bit like a sport or an instrument: you invest in it not just because you have to, but because you genuinely want to be better tomorrow than you are today.
If that sounds exciting, don't second-guess yourself. Get in touch. Send us something you've shipped that you're proud of (a product, a teardown, a write-up, anything goes) and a short note about who you are and why this feels right to you. We value enthusiasm, ambition, and curiosity just as much as your product experience.