Product Manager / Former Founder, New Initiative

Cartesia•San Francisco, CA

1d•$180,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

Cartesia is hiring a Product Manager to lead a new initiative at the company — a 0→1 product effort building on top of our foundation models. We're looking for someone to operate as the CEO of this initiative. This is not a traditional PM role. We're looking for someone who has already lived the 0→1 loop — customer discovery, building, selling — and who can set the pace for a squad of researchers, engineers, designers, and GTM partners. You'll own the initiative end to end and report directly to the Head of Product. You'll be the dedicated PM on this product, with the scope to shape strategy, run discovery, spar with research, and push deals to close alongside GTM.

Requirements

Founder experience: you have founded (or been founding PM at) a B2B SaaS, AI, or developer-tools startup and personally taken a 0→1 product into market — living the full loop of customer discovery → building → selling
Execution velocity and ownership: a deep bias to ship, comfort with ambiguity, and a track record of setting the pace for the people around you; you treat blockers as personal problems to solve
Deep working knowledge of modern AI/ML systems and the tradeoffs that matter in production — or a clear track record of getting to expert-level in a technical domain within weeks
Customer-led and sales-comfortable: you've personally driven early customer acquisition at a previous company, can run a discovery call solo, walk a technical buyer through architecture, and push a deal to close alongside GTM
Product taste paired with technical depth: you can spar with research and engineering on model behavior, eval design, and architecture, with strong opinions grounded in customer evidence
Cross-functional leadership without authority: you've led R&D + GTM + design as a founder and can do it again here as a peer; a strong written communicator who produces primers, narratives, and POVs that travel on their own

Nice To Haves

Already a credible external voice in applied AI — or clearly capable of becoming one and excited to
Built a real-time or applied AI product previously
Prior PM time at a high-velocity AI lab or infra company (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.)
Technical degree or prior engineering experience

Responsibilities

Own the initiative's roadmap, strategy, and execution pace — translate customer evidence into strong, opinionated bets and kill work that isn't worth doing
Shape go-to-market alongside the GTM team, from positioning to pricing to which segments we go after first
Run customer discovery personally and partner with GTM to close the early wave of customers
Drive cross-functional alignment across research, engineering, design, and GTM as a peer — without relying on formal authority
Become a credible external voice for Cartesia through writing, talks, and customer-facing thought leadership