Product Manager

SageOx is a well-funded, early-stage startup at the frontier of how AI is shaping the world. At SageOx, we believe the future of work is deeply human and collaborative. As agents take on execution, coordination, and routine work, people gain space for what only humans do well: creativity, judgment, relationships, the work of imagining, deciding, and creating together. Humans become not only more productive individually, but better at working with each other, leaning on their AI coworkers to carry out execution and raise the quality of how they collaborate.

We're looking for strategic hires - fearless, creative, independent thinkers - that will shape the future of the company, and how work is done in the modern world.

There's no trail yet. Pioneering and breaking trails is one of our company's core values. You're one of the first ten people cutting it.

Why this role exists

You'll be the first product manager at SageOx, reporting directly to the CPO. The company is small enough and early enough that the decisions you make will have a foundational impact on our customers and on the trajectory of the product and the company.

Everyone at SageOx is a builder who ships to production, and you will be too. But you'll also augment the team with specific product craft — understanding customer needs before they can even articulate them, testing solutions, communicating direction, exercising judgement in a way that accelerates the team. That craft is changing fast in the agentic era, and you'll help define what it becomes. We want someone excited by that shift: hands-on enough to prototype an idea and get the team excited about it, and already thinking about how teams will work with agents a few years from now, not just today.

Unlike traditional Product roles, you'll focus as much on the culture, rituals, and workflows around how SageOx is used as you do on specific features. Deep empathy for customers and understanding of interpersonal dynamics are critical for informing the right decisions.

This role will morph over time as needs evolve but will largely focus on:

• Understand what customers need. Stay close to how teams actually work with agents and how they use SageOx — usage data, customer conversations, support threads, the moments where someone (or some agent) reached for context and didn't find it. Turn that raw signal into a clear, current picture of what customers are trying to do, what's missing, and what's getting in their way.

• Think deeply about value — creating, communicating, and capturing it. SageOx creates a new category of products, so there's no recipe to copy for how we create, communicate, and capture value. You'll need to work out what specific moments in the customer experience create the most value, which of those moments a team would pay for, and how the product should be shaped and packaged so that what's valuable to customers is also what sustains the company.

• Steer, and build the system that lets us experiment. Ideas are abundant here and execution is cheap. What's scarce is having judgement on which bets to pursue based on the evidence we collect. This role helps steer: framing the questions worth answering, and building the process by which we build, put things in front of real teams, validate quickly, and drop what doesn't hold up.

How this person operates

• Driven by curiosity, courageous in experimenting, humble in success.

• Ships features and experiments instead of producing strategy decks without execution.

• Moves from an ambiguous customer problem to testable hypotheses to a finished experiment.

• Balances speed with taste. The goal is not maximum output; it is the right product — envisioned, packaged, priced, and communicated to the right customers. That often means saying no, cutting scope, and synthesizing rather than adding.

• Seasoned in customer discovery — meeting customers where they are, observing unobtrusively, asking sharp questions — and changing direction when evidence contradicts the original idea.

What we're looking for

We don't care which door you came through — product management, engineering, marketing, founding a company, or design. We care that you can find the right thing to build and get it built.

• 3–10 years shipping pioneering products. The title matters less than the evidence: things you shipped, decisions you made, and what happened after.

• Mission alignment: believes deeply in what SageOx is building. Lives and breathes the product every day, all day long.

• Deep, hands-on fluency with AI: you not only use AI in all aspects of your work but also have deep curiosity about the ecosystem — emerging technologies, products, practices.

• Zero-to-one experience: you've lived through creating something from nothing — ambiguous problem, small team, no playbook.

• Experiment-minded: makes many parallel bets and picks the winners; can talk in hypotheses, baselines, and results.

• Deep customer empathy: wants to understand and solve customer problems, and orients toward finding those customers.

• Thinks deeply, communicates clearly, writes well: AI slop is all around us — stand on your own thinking, clarity, and craft.

• Strong sense of ownership: owns outcomes; makes things happen with limited resources; has a great sense of direction and prioritization amid the ambiguity of an early-stage startup.

• Cultural fit: embodies SageOx's values.

Great to have

• Founder or early-employee experience somewhere that grew fast.

• Connected to the builder scene in Seattle, San Francisco, and online.

Location — Seattle, in person

Same as every role here. In person, five days a week, in Seattle. We move fast and the work benefits enormously from being in the room.

One narrow exception: Bay Area-based candidates who can get to Seattle at least one week a month, for the first six months.

How We Hire

No traditional interviews. We'll clear an initial assessment and invite you to a work trial: 3–5 days in Seattle, working on something real alongside the team, the way the team actually works. Most of what matters shows up there faster than any interview loop could reveal.

Before applying, please learn more about our work trials.

Ajit wrote up why we hire this way: Read the post

SageOx Today

$15M seed led by Canaan, with A.Capital, Pioneer Square Labs, and Founders' Co-op. Founded by Ajit Banerjee (AWS EC2/EBS, XetHub → Hugging Face), Ryan Snodgrass (early Amazon, Kindle/AWS-scale cloud systems), and Milkana Brace (EVP of Product at Remitly). Small on purpose. More about the team →

Compensation

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. We'll talk specifics once we know it's a real mutual fit.

Apply

We're not working with recruiters or recruiting agencies/consultants at this time — direct applications only, please.