Product Manager Principal Lead

Capital Group•Irvine, CA

2d•$208,245 - $354,017

About The Position

Capital Group is hiring a technical product leader for its AI Transformation Incubator, a central innovation engine that identifies, pilots, and scales a portfolio of high-impact initiatives reimagining end-to-end business processes with advanced AI. The role turns ambitious AI ideas into valuable, scalable products for internal customers, working across product, engineering, data, and enterprise transformation. It calls for a builder with strong product judgment who can work with executives and users, prototype with modern AI development tools, and partner with engineers and business leaders to deliver measurable impact. The product leader translates ambiguous business problems into prototypes, experiments, and production-ready products; works through enterprise technical constraints; shapes product direction and architecture; and applies practical knowledge of modern AI systems, including LLMs, agentic workflows, orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, and observability. The role also helps teams balance technical complexity, business value, speed, reliability, and cost, and identifies successful experiments that can become reusable services, frameworks, or capabilities. The position operates with autonomy and creativity while navigating a global enterprise’s architecture, infrastructure, security, data, and organizational complexity. It is not primarily a roadmap-management, engineering-coordination, or stakeholder-management role. The successful person helps high-impact AI initiatives progress, turns complex challenges into clear product choices, and enables Capital Group to build and deploy AI products more broadly. Capital Group describes a respectful, inclusive workplace that values diverse perspectives and offers competitive compensation, bonuses, benefits, generous time away, health benefits from day one, flexible work options, matching charitable gifts, annual grants for eligible organizations, and on-demand professional development resources. The role’s Southern California base salary range is $208,245–$354,017. The posting also states eligibility for individual annual performance and annual profitability bonuses, plus a retirement plan to which Capital contributes 15% of eligible earnings, subject to plan guidelines, restrictions, and vesting requirements.

Requirements

Demonstrated builder mentality, including personally designing, prototyping, and shipping software.
Comfort writing and reviewing code and making ideas tangible without relying exclusively on engineering teams.
Strong product judgment: ability to identify valuable problems, understand users, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and distinguish technically interesting ideas from commercially meaningful opportunities.
Applied AI experience building or deploying AI-powered applications.
Understanding of practical engineering challenges integrating models, enterprise data, APIs, and workflows into reliable systems.
Systems thinking across applications, data, infrastructure, identity, security, and integration layers, including identifying root causes and architectural implications.
Creative, resourceful, and curious problem-solving; willingness to investigate blockers, explore alternatives, and find a responsible path forward.
Ability to influence senior engineers and executives, navigate organizational complexity, and constructively challenge established thinking.
Comfort with ambiguity and experience succeeding in entrepreneurial or fast-moving environments where the problem, technology, and production path were not fully defined.
Sound risk judgment and ability to build quickly while respecting security, privacy, governance, and operational requirements in a regulated enterprise.

Responsibilities

Translate ambiguous business problems into working prototypes, experiments, and production-ready products.
Identify and work through technical constraints involving enterprise platforms, data access, integrations, infrastructure, and existing architecture.
Challenge assumptions about technical feasibility and offer creative alternatives and evidence-based recommendations.
Determine whether problems call for architectural changes or can be addressed through pragmatic engineering, configuration, or execution.
Shape product direction and architecture with engineers, business stakeholders, and enterprise technology leaders.
Apply working knowledge of modern AI systems, including LLMs, agentic workflows, orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, and observability.
Help teams make tradeoffs across technical complexity, business value, speed, reliability, and cost.
Identify opportunities to turn successful experiments into reusable services, frameworks, or capabilities.
Work across business, engineering, architecture, infrastructure, security, and data teams to resolve dependencies and accelerate delivery.
Offer credible technical alternatives when platforms, standards, processes, or organizational boundaries constrain progress.
Build relationships with technology partners and constructively challenge decisions that may limit business outcomes.
Partner with business leaders and technology teams to ensure products achieve strong business impact.
Help scale successful experiments into products and reusable capabilities and improve how Capital Group builds and deploys AI products.

Benefits

Competitive salary
Individual annual performance bonus
Annual profitability bonus
Retirement plan with a company contribution of 15% of eligible earnings, subject to plan guidelines, restrictions, and vesting requirements
Generous time away
Health benefits from day one
Flexible work options
Matching gifts for charitable contributions at a 2-for-1 rate
Opportunity to secure annual grants for charitable organizations
On-demand professional development resources