Senior Technical Product Manager — AI & Child Safety

National Center on Sexual Exploitation•Washington, DC

26d•$140,000 - $165,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) seeks a Senior Technical Product Manager to lead the development, beta testing, launch, and continued evolution of its AI-powered Parent Center. The product provides parents, caregivers, and communities with practical guidance to help protect children in a complex digital environment. This hands-on product leadership role is distinct from traditional project management and serves as NCOSE’s day-to-day product ownership for the Parent Center, initially focusing on a school beta deployment with real-world users. The product manager will work between organizational leadership, users, subject-matter experts, and an external software development team, ensuring the product reflects NCOSE’s mission and child-safety expertise. The role includes owning product planning and delivery; designing and evaluating the school beta; establishing rigorous AI-quality testing and measurable release thresholds; and managing the external development firm’s deliverables, estimates, timelines, quality, and readiness. The successful candidate will be technically fluent enough to assess recommendations, ask informed questions, identify product and technical risks, and validate fixes through regression testing. They will also establish reporting and monitoring for product health, AI quality, feedback, defects, development progress, and launch readiness, and help shape NCOSE’s longer-term AI and digital product strategy. The position is hybrid at the DC office or optionally remote. Remote employees must work in a quiet space without background noise and keep their camera on during calls and meetings. Local travel to meetings and occasional out-of-town travel may be required. The role involves sitting for long periods, standing or walking as needed, and light lifting up to 15 pounds. Salary is $140,000–$165,000, commensurate with experience; exceptional candidates may be considered above the range.

Requirements

At least 6 years of product management, technical product management, software product leadership, or closely related experience.
Demonstrated experience taking a meaningful technology product through development, beta or pilot, and launch.
Strong technical fluency and experience working directly with software engineering teams.
Experience managing external technology vendors and/or distributed engineering teams.
Experience developing product requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, roadmaps, and release plans.
Strong QA and analytical mindset.
Ability to communicate technical issues clearly to nontechnical executives and stakeholders.
Strong organizational skills and personal accountability.
Ability to work effectively in a mission-driven organization where poor product decisions can have significant consequences.
Technical understanding sufficient to communicate with engineers and evaluate decisions involving modern web applications, APIs and integrations, cloud infrastructure, databases, authentication and authorization, analytics and telemetry, software development lifecycle, QA and automated testing, AI/LLM systems, prompt engineering, RAG, model evaluation, AI guardrails, hallucination mitigation, observability, security, and privacy.
Ability to ask development teams to explain architecture and estimates and recognize when an explanation is inadequate.

Nice To Haves

Direct product experience with generative AI or LLM-powered applications.
Conversational AI or chatbot experience.
Experience with RAG, AI evaluation frameworks, model testing, guardrails, or AI observability.
Experience conducting AI red-team or adversarial testing.
EdTech or K-12 technology experience.
Trust & Safety experience.
Child-safety technology experience.
Digital health or other high-stakes technology experience.
Experience with privacy-sensitive or regulated products.

Responsibilities

Own the Parent Center product from beta through broader deployment.
Translate NCOSE’s vision, child-safety expertise, stakeholder requirements, and user feedback into actionable product requirements.
Develop and maintain the product roadmap, backlog, user stories, priorities, acceptance criteria, and release schedule.
Serve as the primary day-to-day product contact between NCOSE leadership and the external development team.
Ensure technology decisions remain aligned with the mission and intended purpose of the Parent Center.
Design and manage the initial school beta program, including testing protocols, success metrics, feedback mechanisms, and launch criteria.
Coordinate onboarding and communication with participating schools and users.
Analyze qualitative and quantitative beta feedback and turn findings into product improvements.
Report on beta performance, adoption, user experience, defects, risks, and development progress.
Develop a repeatable evaluation framework and test suites for the AI system, including normal, ambiguous, adversarial, and high-risk situations.
Evaluate AI response accuracy and usefulness, hallucinations, source quality, consistency, escalation, child-safety scenarios, crisis situations, privacy, and system guardrails.
Partner with NCOSE subject-matter experts to ensure the system reflects organizational guidance and child-safety best practices.
Establish measurable release thresholds for AI quality.
Manage the external development firm at the product level and hold it accountable for deliverables, estimates, timelines, quality, defect resolution, documentation, and release readiness.
Review proposed technical solutions, ask informed questions, and identify unclear estimates, unnecessary complexity, product risks, technical debt, and gaps between requirements and delivered functionality.
Ensure fixes are validated through regression testing before release.
Establish formal criteria for progression from internal testing to school beta, expanded pilot, and production launch.
Create dashboards and reporting for product health, AI quality, user feedback, open defects, critical issues, development velocity, and launch readiness.
Lead post-launch product monitoring and continuous improvement.
Help develop NCOSE’s long-term strategy for additional AI and digital products.
Communicate technical issues clearly to nontechnical executives and stakeholders and raise concerns when a product is not ready or does not meet requirements.