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Founding Product Manager Jobs in Raleigh, NC (NOW HIRING)

Join a founding team who've shipped products for Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Nike, and Apple. We ... Higharc is seeking a hands-on Forward Deployed Product Manager to turn a large production ...

Product Director - Evinova

Durham, NC · On-site

$190 - $270/hr

This is a founding product leadership role: you will define the vision, strategy, and roadmap for ... As Product Director, you will operate with significant autonomy and act as the general manager for ...

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Product Director - Evinova

Durham, NC · On-site

$225K - $235K/yr

This is a founding product leadership role: you will define the vision, strategy, and roadmap for ... As Product Director, you will operate with significant autonomy and act as the general manager for ...

Product Director - Evinova

Durham, NC · On-site

$225K - $235K/yr

This is a founding product leadership role: you will define the vision, strategy, and roadmap for ... As Product Director, you will operate with significant autonomy and act as the general manager for ...

Product Director - Evinova

Durham, NC

$225K - $235K/yr

This is a founding product leadership role: you will define the vision, strategy, and roadmap for ... As Product Director, you will operate with significant autonomy and act as the general manager for ...

Product Director - Evinova

Durham, NC · On-site

$225K - $235K/yr

This is a founding product leadership role: you will define the vision, strategy, and roadmap for ... As Product Director, you will operate with significant autonomy and act as the general manager for ...

Product Director - Evinova

Durham, NC · On-site

$225K - $235K/yr

This is a founding product leadership role: you will define the vision, strategy, and roadmap for ... As Product Director, you will operate with significant autonomy and act as the general manager for ...

Product Director - Evinova (Durham)

Durham, NC · On-site

$221K - $232K/yr

This is a founding product leadership role: you will define the vision, strategy, and roadmap for ... As Product Director, you will operate with significant autonomy and act as the general manager for ...

New

Sr. Product Manager, Studio

Durham, NC · Remote

$129K - $170K/yr

Join a founding team who've shipped products for Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Nike, and Apple. We ... Higharc is seeking an accomplished Senior Product Manager to own Studio, our browser-based 2D and ...

Founding Engineer

Durham, NC · On-site

$170 - $250/hr

... on product direction and architecture from day one. What You'll Do * Orchestrate a fleet of AI ... Develop call center management tooling and scheduling algorithms for recruiters and clinical ...

Director of Product, Enterprise

Durham, NC · Remote

$238K - $249K/yr

Join a founding team who've shipped products for Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Nike, and Apple. We ... Build and manage a strong team of product managers across this portfolio, helping the team deliver ...

Director of Product, Enterprise (Durham)

Durham, NC · On-site

$221K - $232K/yr

Join a founding team who've shipped products for Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Nike, and Apple. We ... Build and manage a strong team of product managers across this portfolio, helping the team deliver ...

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Showing results 1-20

Founding Product Manager information

See Raleigh, NC salary details

$50.1K

$155K

$191.5K

How much do founding product manager jobs pay per year?

As of Sep 7, 2026, the average yearly pay for founding product manager in Raleigh, NC is $154,954.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $137,100.00 and $191,500.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is a founding product manager?

A Founding Product Manager is an early team member, often one of the first hires, responsible for shaping the product vision and strategy at a startup. They work closely with the founders to define the product roadmap, gather user feedback, and prioritize features to help achieve product-market fit. Unlike traditional product managers, Founding Product Managers often wear multiple hats, contributing to areas like user research, design, and even marketing. Their decisions can significantly influence the trajectory of the company, making this a highly impactful and entrepreneurial role.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive as a founding product manager?

To thrive as a Founding Product Manager, you need strong product strategy, market analysis, and cross-functional leadership skills, typically backed by experience in product management or startup environments. Familiarity with tools like Jira, Figma, analytics platforms, and agile methodologies is commonly required. Exceptional communication, adaptability, and entrepreneurial mindset are vital soft skills for this role. These capabilities are crucial for driving early-stage product success, aligning diverse teams, and quickly iterating in dynamic startup settings.

What unique challenges can a founding product manager expect when building products in an early-stage startup?

As a Founding Product Manager, you’ll often face the challenge of working with limited resources and ambiguous requirements, as early-stage startups typically have evolving priorities and smaller teams. You’ll likely wear multiple hats, closely collaborating with founders, engineers, and designers to define the product vision and quickly iterate on feedback. This environment demands strong adaptability, proactive problem-solving, and a willingness to validate assumptions through rapid experimentation. Being comfortable with change and uncertainty is essential, but these challenges also offer the unique opportunity to shape the company’s product strategy and culture from the ground up.

What is the difference between Founding Product Manager vs Product Manager?

AspectFounding Product ManagerProduct Manager
CredentialsExperience in startups, product development, and sometimes technical backgroundTypically requires experience in product lifecycle, market research, and cross-functional collaboration
Work EnvironmentEarly-stage startups, high autonomy, broad responsibilitiesEstablished companies or growing teams, focused on specific product areas
Employer & Industry UsageStartups, tech companies, entrepreneurial venturesTech firms, consumer goods, SaaS companies
Search & Comparison IntentUnderstanding startup roles, early product leadershipStandard product management roles, career progression

The main difference is that a Founding Product Manager leads product development at a startup's inception, often wearing multiple hats and shaping the company's product vision. A Product Manager typically works within established organizations, managing specific products or features with more defined responsibilities.

What are popular job titles related to Founding Product Manager jobs in Raleigh, NC?

For Founding Product Manager jobs in Raleigh, NC, the most frequently searched job titles are:

What job categories do people searching Founding Product Manager jobs in Raleigh, NC look for?

The top searched job categories for Founding Product Manager jobs in Raleigh, NC are:

What cities near Raleigh, NC are hiring for Founding Product Manager jobs?

Cities near Raleigh, NC with the most Founding Product Manager job openings:

Infographic showing various Founding Product Manager job openings in Raleigh, NC as of August 2026, with employment types broken down into 86% Full Time, 12% Part Time, and 2% Contract. Highlights an 83% Physical, 2% Hybrid, and 15% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $154,954 per year, or $74.5 per hour.

Forward Deployed Product Manager

Higharc

Durham, NC • Remote

Full-time

Medical, Dental, Vision, Retirement, PTO

Posted 13 days ago


Job description

About Us

Higharc is a VC-backed startup that is changing how new homes are designed and built. Join a founding team who’ve shipped products for Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Nike, and Apple. We have raised over $175M with support from top-notch venture capital firms and more than 18 strategic investors: industry leaders in construction, building products manufacturing, and distribution.

Higharc is seeking a hands-on Forward Deployed Product Manager to turn a large production homebuilder's unstructured plan catalog into structured, queryable product data. This is a founding role on a brand-new Forward Deployed team.

What You'll Do

A homebuilder's plan library is the product data behind its entire business, and at enterprise scale that data is almost entirely unstructured. Plans live as drawing sets scattered across semi-autonomous divisions, renamed and re-numbered as they move. Nobody can say with confidence which plans are duplicates, how many versions of a given home exist, or what actually varies between them.

Higharc converts those catalogs into structured, queryable plan data and builds the analysis on top of it: searchable plan libraries with agent-enabled natural-language search, geometric similarity scoring that surfaces plans which have forked under different names, structured mapping of what varies across a library, and classification that makes consolidation decisions possible.

You'll own what gets built in the field, working embedded alongside our Forward Deployed Engineers and in partnership with the homebuilder to turn plans into actionable data. This is a role for someone who wants to be close to where the problem lives. Higharc is fully remote; you can sit anywhere in the continental U.S., with travel to client sites and company events up to 30% of the time.

Expect to:

  • Embed with HQ, regional, and division teams to run discovery—locate plan assets, establish source of truth, and document how each division represents its plans and where variation originates.

  • Own product definition for the searchable plan library, analytics dashboard, and agent-enabled search—what a good query looks like, what a useful answer looks like, and what "structured for analysis" actually means.

  • Tune Higharc's Autotranslate AI to identify, categorize, and translate floorplans into data.

  • Work hands-on with the data: query the structured plan library directly, build against our internal APIs, and ship working capability back to users rather than filing a ticket and waiting.

  • Define acceptance criteria for delivery milestones—coverage targets, data-field completeness, QA error thresholds—and hold the line on them when schedule pressure argues otherwise.

  • Frame and defend quantifiable ROI: redundancy across a catalog, dimensional spread on repeated conditions, consolidation candidates, and the purchasing leverage each one represents.

  • Partner with Forward Deployed Engineering, the Technical Lead, QA, Intake Specialists, and Client Strategy, and present progress and tradeoffs to executive stakeholders.

  • Capture the playbooks, artifacts, and data patterns that let the forward deployed model carry over to the next engagement.

About You

You're a product manager who is happiest closest to the customer, and you've learned that the fastest path to the right answer is usually to go look. You're comfortable being handed a scope that is 70% specified and a data set nobody has structured before. You can hold a conversation with an architect about how a plan set is drawn in the morning and write the query that tests your hypothesis about it in the afternoon.

You know the difference between a demo and a deliverable, and you're honest with customers about which one they're looking at.

You have:

  • 5+ years of product management experience, including significant time in customer-facing or deployed settings—enterprise implementations, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or professional services.

  • Hands-on technical fluency: you write SQL, work in notebooks, script against APIs, and interrogate a data set yourself rather than requesting a pull.

  • Experience prototyping to validate ideas quickly using tools like Cursor, Replit, or V0.dev.

  • A track record defining structured data models, taxonomies, or classification schemes and getting a business to actually adopt them.

  • Strong judgment about data quality—what level of accuracy a decision requires, and what it costs to get there.

  • Excellent written and verbal communication, including with executive stakeholders who have limited time and no patience for status without substance.

  • Willingness to travel to client sites and company events up to 30% of the time.

A major plus if you also bring:

  • Background in residential construction, homebuilding, architecture, or AEC technology—especially fluency with plan sets, elevations, options, and how builders manage plan variation.

  • Experience with agent-based or natural-language search over structured data, RAG systems, or LLM-powered analytics.

  • Exposure to geometric or spatial data—CAD/BIM, computer vision on drawings, similarity and clustering methods.

  • Experience with large, messy, enterprise-scale data migrations or ingestion programs.

  • Experience building a function from zero: first hire into a new team, new practice, or new delivery model.

Working at Higharc

Remote work and travel: Our company is entirely remote, and has been since we were founded in 2018. Remote work means more time with family, less time commuting, and the flexibility to blend work and life. We value in-person collaboration and asynchronous deep-work time, which is why we schedule regular team meet-ups in our hubs across the US and, depending on the role, prioritize hiring in those hubs. If your role requires frequent travel beyond pre-scheduled team meet ups, we will represent that to the best of our ability as early as possible in the interview process.

Compensation and benefits: Higharc offers competitive salaries with significant equity, in a fast-growing, well-funded company. We provide comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, with flexible PTO, and meaningful maternity/paternity leave to all U.S based employees that are full-time. You'll also have access to other big-company benefits such like short and long-term disability plans and a 401K. We also provide a stipend to create the ideal home office and support ongoing L&D.
Please note: we are seeing an uptick of fraudulent recruiting activity claiming to be associated with Higharc. All communication and outreach from our in-house team will come from an @higharc.com email address.