Founding Head of Product

Protagonist•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Protagonist is building an AI-native guidance platform that helps colleges and universities design, own, and govern deeply personalized student experiences—across enrollment, advising, persistence, and career navigation. We are not retrofitting AI onto legacy workflows. We are designing a new, institution-grade intelligence layer—built around learner memory, orchestration between AI and humans, and institutional governance—from first principles. Protagonist is led by a repeat founder, Charles Thornburgh, who has previously built category-defining companies in education technology. The company combines deep domain experience with a conviction that AI enables a fundamentally new approach to how student guidance systems are designed, governed, and scaled. We are early, working with design-partner institutions, and are launching our first pilots this spring. The Role We are looking for a Founding Head of Product to co-build Protagonist alongside the founding team. This is a founder-adjacent role for a highly curious, technically strong product leader who wants to help invent: A new category of AI-enabled student guidance A new way of building product in deep partnership with institutions A new personal leadership arc alongside a company from the ground up You will own product discovery, definition, and delivery end-to-end—and play a central role in shaping the core platform capabilities that make Protagonist work at institutional scale. You will be expected to move fluidly between strategic product thinking and hands-on technical engagement, including participating directly in scoping and deployment work with our institutional partners. This is not a role for someone who needs a large team, heavy process, or a finished roadmap to be effective.

Requirements

5–10+ years building digital products, with meaningful experience in early-stage or 0→1 environments
Technically strong — you can engage credibly with engineers, understand architecture tradeoffs, and get hands-on when needed
Genuinely excited about AI — not just as a feature, but as a catalyst for rethinking how products are discovered, built, and delivered
Comfortable operating at the boundary of product and engineering; able to hold complex systems in your head across users, institutions, policy, UX, data, and infrastructure
Opinionated, but open to learning and changing your mind quickly — you move fast, make decisions with incomplete information, and course correct without ego
Comfortable representing Protagonist in senior institutional conversations alongside the CEO and Solutions Lead, including with presidents, provosts, and CIOs

Nice To Haves

Experience in education, workforce, or other highly regulated domains
Experience designing AI- or LLM-enabled products
Background in behavioral science, learning science, or systems design
Hands-on engineering background or experience in a technical co-founder-adjacent role

Responsibilities

Own Product Vision, Strategy, and Roadmap
Own and evolve Protagonist’s product vision, strategy, and roadmap in close partnership with the CEO
Translate institutional insights, learner needs, and AI capabilities into clear product bets
Run high-velocity learning loops across prototypes, pilots, and live deployments
Establish the product rituals, decision frameworks, and operating cadence that will scale with the company
Build the Core Platform
Work closely with engineering to design and build the foundational systems that power Protagonist: Learner memory and longitudinal context, Orchestration logic connecting AI, human advisors, and institutional workflows, Institution-grade governance, observability, and trust systems
Help define what “good” looks like for AI behavior, safety, and institutional alignment
Shape the end-to-end learner and advisor experience—tone, trust, escalation, and UX
Be comfortable with some hands-on keyboard engineering work as needed—this role sits at the boundary of product and engineering
Lead Technical Discovery and Deployment at Institutions
Play a key role in scoping the core platform capabilities required to support each new institutional engagement — translating what you learn in the field into clear requirements for the engineering team
Lead technical discovery conversations with institutional partners — understanding their systems, data environments, security expectations and integration requirements well enough to scope confidently and set realistic expectations
Partner with the Solutions Lead to progressively codify technical discovery into repeatable frameworks and playbooks
Ensure the institutional experience is technically credible and well-executed from day one, working in close partnership with the CEO and Solutions Lead