VP of Product, Handshake AI

Handshake•San Francisco, CA

12d•$340,000 - $380,000•Remote

About The Position

We're hiring a VP of Product to lead product for Handshake AI. This is not a "head of" role in name only—you will be the product leader for one of the fastest-growing AI startups in the country, owning the strategy, roadmap, and execution that determines how fast and how well we scale. You'll sit at the center of a business that is compounding quickly: new customers, new data modalities, a growing operator and fellow ecosystem, and an increasingly complex set of platform needs. Your job is to turn that complexity into a coherent product organization—one with clear strategy, strong PM talent, and a roadmap that keeps pace with (and gets ahead of) the business. You'll report into the CPO, sit on the senior team, and partner directly with Engineering, Design, Operations, and Sales/Customer leadership to shape where Handshake AI goes next.

Requirements

12+ years in product management, including 4+ years as a senior product leader managing other PMs and managers, ideally at a high-growth startup.
Experience owning product for a business (or major business line) growing quickly, with a demonstrated ability to build strategy and org structure that scale with revenue.
Strong operational intuition—you've built or overseen platforms for internal users, operations teams, or complex two-sided marketplaces, not just consumer-facing features.
Track record hiring and developing product talent, including PMs who own ambiguous, 0→1 problem spaces.
Systems thinker who can hold a multi-modality, multi-stakeholder roadmap in their head and make coherent trade-offs across it.
Comfortable operating in high ambiguity: the market, the customer needs, and the product surface area are all still being defined.
Data-informed but action-oriented—you use metrics to prioritize, but you move with conviction when the signal is directional rather than definitive.
Excellent executive communication; you can represent product strategy credibly to the C-suite, the board, and customers.

Nice To Haves

Experience in human data, annotation/labeling, RLHF, or AI training data ecosystems.
Experience building or scaling a marketplace or platform business (two-sided, operator/worker-facing, or similar).
Prior experience at a fast-growing AI lab, data company, or enterprise SaaS company through a period of hypergrowth.
Experience building career, talent, or workforce products.

Responsibilities

Set the product strategy for Handshake AI as a whole—across data modalities, the operator and fellow platforms, and customer-facing surfaces. Translate "become the career network and data engine for the AI economy" into a concrete, sequenced roadmap.
Build, lead, and grow a product organization of PMs across modalities and platform pods (e.g., Operator Experience, Fellow Experience, modality-specific pods like Coding). Hire exceptional product talent, set the bar for craft and rigor, and develop the managers and ICs on your team.
Be the connective tissue between Engineering, Design, Operations, and GTM. Ensure the product org's priorities reflect both what customers need and what will scale the business fastest, and that trade-offs across pods are made coherently rather than in silos.
Make and own the hard calls: which modalities to invest in, which platform capabilities to build now vs. later, and where to say no. Communicate strategy and trade-offs clearly to the exec team and the board.
Define what success looks like for the product org—revenue enablement, quality outcomes, operator/fellow efficiency, time-to-launch for new modalities and customers—and hold the org accountable to it.
Spend real time with AI labs, enterprise customers, and internal stakeholders to understand how the market is evolving. Use that fluency to keep Handshake AI ahead of where the human-data category is heading, not just responsive to it.
Ensure the underlying product and operational platform can flex to new customer types, data types, and volumes—so growth in revenue doesn't require linear growth in headcount or one-off engineering.