technical product manager - AI

Starbucks Coffee Company•Nashville, TN

3d•$108,900 - $181,600•Onsite

About The Position

Starbucks is seeking a Technical Product Manager to bridge business stakeholders and the AI engineering team, translating sourcing and procurement workflows into clear product specifications for AI-enabled systems. The role requires domain knowledge in sourcing and procurement, technical fluency with LLM-powered products, and the ability to work across stakeholder reviews, data schema discussions, and agile delivery. The Technical Product Manager owns functional design specifications and the product backlog for the AI-enabled sourcing platform. This includes translating workflows such as calendaring, market intelligence, contract management, and commodity analysis into engineer-ready requirements; prioritizing AI-enabled features; coordinating resolution of data, integration, and policy questions; and taking specifications through stakeholder approval. The role facilitates stage-gate approvals across product requirements, functional and technical design, QA, and release, and partners with Security, Architecture, and Legal on AI governance, privacy, ethics, model validation, and production readiness. It also manages phased delivery planning, coordinates data readiness with business partners, runs agile ceremonies alongside the Principal Engineer, and participates in UAT and reviews of AI outputs. The position is onsite four days a week. Starbucks offers eligible partners a range of insurance, leave, retirement, stock, education, and other benefits.

Requirements

Proven ability to write clear product requirements, functional design documents, and user stories with acceptance criteria that engineers can build from.
Experience running agile ceremonies, including sprint planning, backlog grooming, retrospectives, and stakeholder demos.
Ability to prioritize under ambiguity, explain trade-offs, and move a team forward.
Ability to decompose complex workflows into phased delivery plans; familiarity with MVP scoping and iterative rollout.
Strong stakeholder management skills, including facilitating reviews with senior sponsors and individual contributors.
Ability to read and reason about API contracts, data schemas, and system diagrams; production coding is not required.
Working knowledge of AI/ML product capabilities and limitations, including RAG, LLM-based classification, and agentic workflows.
Comfort using Jira, Linear, or an equivalent backlog management tool; familiarity with Git-based documentation workflows such as Markdown and pull-request review.
Ability to interpret dashboards and basic data queries to investigate product questions.
Excellent written communication, including PRDs, status updates, and decision logs.
Experience partnering with data, finance, and legal stakeholders or internal customers.
Comfort presenting to technical teams and non-technical business stakeholders, adapting the level of detail as needed.
Bachelor’s degree in Business, Supply Chain, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
3–6 years of product management or product analyst experience, including at least 1–2 years in a technically complex or AI-adjacent product environment.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience in or building products for Source-to-Contract (S2C) or Procure-to-Pay (P2P) workflows, such as RFx, supplier evaluation, contract lifecycle, commodity management, or spend analytics.
Familiarity with enterprise procurement platforms such as Coupa, SAP Ariba, Oracle, or Jaggaer.
Understanding of sourcing calendars, commodity price benchmarking, supplier performance management, or contract analytics.
Knowledge of compliance and auditability requirements common in enterprise procurement.
Experience as a product manager or analyst at a CPG, retail, foodservice, or global supply chain organization.
Prior work on AI-enabled enterprise products.
Familiarity with engineering delivery metrics, such as deployment frequency, lead time, and incident rate, and how they inform product and roadmap decisions.

Responsibilities

Own functional design specifications and the product backlog for the AI-enabled sourcing platform.
Translate sourcing and procurement workflows—including calendaring, market intelligence, contract management, and commodity analysis—into clear product requirements for engineering.
Define and prioritize AI-enabled platform features, balancing business value, data readiness, and technical feasibility.
Coordinate with business stakeholders to resolve data, integration, and policy questions that could block engineering.
Drive each module’s functional specification from draft through stakeholder sign-off.
Write user stories and acceptance criteria and maintain a current, prioritized sprint backlog.
Facilitate structured sign-off gates for progression through product requirements, functional design, technical design, QA, and release.
Partner with Security, Architecture, and Legal on AI governance checkpoints covering ethics, data privacy, model validation, and production readiness.
Gather requirements and secure decisions with procurement, supply chain, finance, and legal stakeholders.
Represent the team in leadership demos and status reviews, communicating engineering progress in business terms.
Own the phased delivery plan across releases, tracking MVP features, deferred features, and AI-enabler work.
Coordinate data readiness with business partners, including sample data, field mappings, and system-of-record decisions.
Run sprint planning, backlog grooming, demos, and retrospectives; manage the cross-module backlog alongside the Principal Engineer.
Participate in UAT and AI output reviews and assess whether releases are ready for stakeholders.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
Basic and supplemental life insurance and other voluntary insurance benefits.
Short-term and long-term disability.
Paid parental leave and family expansion reimbursement.
Paid vacation from date of hire and sick time accrued at 1 hour for every 25 hours worked.
Eight paid holidays and two personal days per year.
Eligible participation in a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
Discounted company stock program (S.I.P.) and Starbucks equity program (Bean Stock).
Incentivized emergency savings and financial well-being tools.
100% upfront tuition coverage for a first-time bachelor’s degree through Arizona State University’s online program via the Starbucks College Achievement Plan.
Student loan management resources and access to other educational opportunities.
Backup care and DACA reimbursement.