Technical Product Owner, AI-Directed Development

CBT Nuggets • Eugene, OR

2d • Remote

About The Position

The Technical Product Owner owns the day-to-day health and growth of two production products: the CBT Nuggets website and the Assessments platform. The role directs AI coding agents to implement software and is accountable for the work that ships, but does not write code. It operates with delegated autonomy to plan, direct, verify, and deliver work while making recommendations—not final decisions—on scope, product trade-offs, risk acceptance, spending, and destructive or irreversible changes. Day-to-day work reports to the Learning Content Team Lead, and the role is accountable to the Product Owner group for shipped work.

The three openings share a common profile and can cover for one another in an emergency. Each has a primary surface: Assessments and data; website, conversion, and copy; or platform, security, and integrations. Applicants should state their preferred surface. The role is not a hands-on development or people-management position and does not have final decision authority.

Both products use Next.js, React, Prisma, and Postgres, are deployed on Vercel, use a columnar warehouse for analytics, and use a model gateway for AI generation. Work proceeds through gated pull requests with mandatory review, committed attestations, and operator documentation. AI agents implement changes under written team rules. Human reviewers merge pull requests.

Success includes shipping changes through the gated workflow on both products in the first 30 days; owning a surface and producing green, maintainable pull requests and concise, actionable escalations within 90 days; and leaving the owned surface healthier, better documented, and supported by well-argued pending decisions over the first year. Evaluation includes specification, pull-request review, escalation, and business-conversation exercises.

The position is full-time, 40 hours per week, salaried, and exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Compensation is $100,000 per year. CBT Nuggets describes its work as remote-friendly, with an office in Eugene, Oregon and most of the team working remotely throughout the United States.

Requirements

• At least five years of experience in IT or software roles involving understanding how production systems are built, deployed, secured, and operated.
• At least one year directing AI coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or equivalent to ship production software, with examples of requests, agent errors, how they were caught, and preventive changes.
• At least two years of product ownership or technical product management, including backlog ownership, specification writing, prioritization, and accountability for outcomes.
• Demonstrated discipline in verifying claims against systems and the ability to explain how a confident source was found to be wrong.
• Operational fluency with GitHub, including pull requests, CI, branch protection, merge conflicts, and force-with-lease; a hosting platform such as Vercel; and a relational database such as Postgres.
• Ability to read SQL and code diffs critically without authoring code.
• Clear, plain written English and the ability to write actionable rules, specifications, and one-page recommendations.
• Comfort with accountability for work not personally written and with escalating decisions outside one's authority.
• Independent thinking and self-starting ability.
• Attention to detail.
• Collaborative approach and comfort working on a team.
• Honesty, humility, integrity, inclusiveness, and respect.
• Strong work ethic, passion for learning, comfort with autonomy, and eagerness to develop new skills.
• Ability to become proficient with an Apple laptop.
• Proficiency with Gmail, Google Docs, Slack, and internal CBT Nuggets software.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Next.js, React, Prisma, Postgres row-level security, OAuth, or a columnar analytics warehouse.
• Experience evaluating AI models for production, including A/B measurement, calibration, cost per output, and deciding when evidence does not support adoption.
• Security and privacy judgment involving dependency advisories, supply-chain overrides, personally identifiable information boundaries, and risk acceptance with an expiry date.
• Product marketing or editorial experience, particularly writing for IT Directors or Training Managers and checking claims against the product.
• Experience in IT training, certification, e-learning, or assessment design.
• Experience negotiating integration contracts with another engineering team.
• Curiosity and assertiveness.
• Interest in IT and/or technology.

Responsibilities

• Learn the CBT Nuggets business, including its customers, purchasing motivations, pricing, and business data.
• Read and use the data warehouse and CRM to verify figures independently.
• Own a backlog for the assigned product surface.
• Turn product intent into precise written specifications that AI agents can execute without guessing.
• Direct AI coding agents through specification, implementation, review, testing, documentation, pull requests, CI, and production verification.
• Critically review every code diff and identify unsupported claims in agent summaries.
• Operate repositories and related systems, including branch protection, required checks, rebases, attestations, dependency advisories, environment variables, crons, feature flags, and deployments.
• Keep operator documentation accurate and update it in the same change when behavior changes.
• Create durable, dated rules from lessons learned and retire stale rules.
• Investigate production incidents using logs, metrics, and database evidence, and document causes and preventive measures.
• Measure before making claims, date readings, and record when earlier readings prove incorrect.
• Reduce friction for colleagues by creating pages with actionable buttons and sharing links when a human decision or labeling task is needed.
• Work openly with teammates using shared rules and conventions rather than private processes.
• Provide evidence-based recommendations to the Product Owner group for decisions reserved to that group.
• Escalate unresolved decisions with a one-page recommendation that states the decision needed, options, evidence, risks, and the recommended course.
• Do not merge pull requests; leave merging to a human.
• Verify work rather than relying on an agent's confidence, and stop and escalate when necessary.

Benefits

• Generous employee benefits.
• Remote work is available; most of the team works remotely throughout the United States.
• The company emphasizes work-life balance and time for family, friends, hobbies, and personal interests.
• Creative freedom and openness to ideas from all team members.
• Opportunities to support charitable causes through NuggetLove.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed