Principal Product Manager

Company: interface.ai Location: Palo Alto, CA (In-Office) Reports to: VP of Product Compensation: $250,000 - $280,000 base salary + bonus + equity (depending on location & experience)About interface.aiBanking hasn't kept up with how people actually live their financial lives. At interface.ai, we're building AI-native products that transform how millions of Americans interact with their financial institutions, making every interaction intelligent, personal, and proactive.Our platform powers AI agents that handle real banking tasks end-to-end: moving money, resolving issues, converting loans, and surfacing financial insights across voice, chat, and digital channels. We're not building another chatbot. We're building the AI infrastructure that will become the primary way people bank, unlocking a massive market opportunity by displacing the legacy systems that financial institutions have been stuck with for decades.With two-thirds of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, only 17% financially literate, and 50% holding less than $500 in savings, the urgency is real. We're putting financial well-being on autopilot.We power AI agents for 100+ financial institutions, serving millions of banking members across the U.S., and are backed by leading investors including Avataar Venture Partners and Blume VenturesOur platform enables banks and credit unions to automate high-volume customer interactions across voice and digital channels while improving resolution rates, reducing operational costs, and increasing customer engagement.Key credibility anchors:Series B AI company building agentic AI infrastructure for financial institutionsTrusted by 100+ banks and credit unions across North AmericaServing millions of end users through conversational AI across voice, chat, and mobile channelsThe OpportunityYou will own the AI platform that every product at the company depends on. This is not a support function: the platform is the competitive moat. Your decisions directly determine the ceiling of what every other product team can build.You'll inherit a multi component platform, assess what exists, and define what comes next: what to consolidate, what to invest in, what to sunset. As the senior IC in a pillar of 3-4PMs, you'll set technical direction, mentor, and raise the quality bar, while partnering with engineering leadership to scale the system to millions of end users at startup speed.What You'll OwnAgent runtime & orchestration: multi-agent orchestration, memory/context management, tool routing, goal planning, and policy-aligned behaviorPlatform contracts: APIs, versioning, deprecation, and migration strategy: you define the boundaries and the lifecycle for all consuming teamsModel lifecycle: selection, evaluation, benchmarking, fine-tuning enablement, and prompt optimization. You define when to prompt-tune vs fine-tune vs switch models.Inference performance & reliability: latency budgets, caching, batching, quantization, multi-region deployments, fallbacks, and safe rollout patterns (canaries, feature flags, rollback)Safety & compliance: PII detection/masking, prompt/response safety policies, tenant isolation, SOC2/GDPR readiness, audit logs, and encryption: compliance is a product requirement, not an afterthoughtEvaluation & quality: offline golden sets, regression testing, hallucination measurement, task success metrics, and production-to-improvement feedback loopsVoice & multimodal: ASR/TTS integration patterns, WER, interruption handling, turn-taking, and latency budgets for real-time conversational intelligencePillar leadership: You set technical direction, mentor, raise the bar, and have input on hiring. You prioritize competing demands from multiple product pillars, define the platform investment thesis, and protect the platform from becoming a feature factory.Who You AreYou think in systems, not features. You read a platform outage postmortem and immediately see the product decision that caused it. You've built API contracts that entire product orgs depend on, and you've made the hard call to break one when the platform needed to evolve.You understand the full AI stack: from model training through inference optimization to production monitoring. You can spec a fine-tuning pipeline, set latency budgets for real-time voice, and debate quantization trade-offs with a staff engineer, all in the same week.You build your own tools. You use AI to prototype, analyze, and accelerate your work — building agents, writing scripts, creating automated workflows, whatever gets the job done fastest. Not because someone told you to, but because you can't imagine working any other way.What You Bring8+ years in product management, with 3+ years at Staff/Principal level on platform, AI/ML, or infrastructure productsOwned a multi-component platform serving multiple product teams, not just a single productDeep technical fluency: can read code, review architecture, and debug production issues alongside engineersExperience with AI/ML platforms: LLM orchestration, model evaluation, fine-tuning, RAG, agentic frameworks, or similarExperience governing platform contracts and managing how internal teams consume capabilitiesBuilt in enterprise SaaS environments with multi-tenant, compliance, and governance requirementsAI-native workflow: You build with AI daily — creating agents, automating analyses, prototyping with code, building custom workflows. The specific tools don't matter (Cursor, Copilot, Claude, Replit, custom scripts — all count); what matters is that you've moved beyond prompting into building.Bonus PointsFinancial services or regulated industry experienceVoice/ASR/TTS systems and real-time latency-sensitive productsLLM evaluation frameworks, multi-agent orchestration, or RLHF/RLAIFKnowledge graph or RAG-based retrieval systemsBuilt a platform team from scratchOur ValuesAct Like You're the Founder: Own the outcome from start to finishNo Fear. Speak Your Mind: Candor moves us forwardPursuit of Excellence: Raise the bar, every timeAI-First Mindset: Think automation, intelligence, and scale-first in every solutionDon't Assume. Seek to Understand: Start with questions, not conclusionsHow We WorkEvery PM builds with AI daily. Our standard toolkit is Cursor, MCP integrations, and custom AI agents — and we onboard every new hire on these tools in their first week. We hold a high quality bar and move at startup speed. Flat organization. No empire-building.What We Offer100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage401(k) with company match and financial wellness perksDiscretionary PTO + paid parental leaveMental health, wellness, and family benefitsCompetitive equity with meaningful upsideinterface.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, or veteran status.