AI Labs: Principal Product Manager

AptaChem Consulting LLC

United States

Remote

USD 170,000 - 243,000

Full time

6 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Medical

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Disability

401(k) match

Career development

Job summary

Paylocity is seeking a Principal Group Product Manager for AI Labs to shape strategy and lead an incubator-like portfolio, partnering with the Chief Innovation Officer to drive AI-enabled product development across discovery, prototyping, and execution.

The role blends hands-on leadership with strategic vision, requiring extensive experience in incubators, AI product patterns, and senior stakeholder management to deliver measurable business impact and scalable solutions.

Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree or higher in a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
8+ years of experience in product management, innovation, product strategy, venture building, or a related field, including 3+ years in a senior leadership role within a fast‑paced, technology‑driven environment.
Demonstrated experience in an incubator, innovation lab, venture studio, zero‑to‑one product team, or similar high‑ambiguity environment.
Direct experience operating within an AI‑driven PDLC; experience helping design, implement, or scale an AI‑enabled product development model is strongly preferred.
Proven ability to take ambiguous customer or business problems from early framing through experimentation, validation, and a clear investment recommendation.
Working knowledge of modern AI product patterns, including generative AI, agents, model evaluation, human‑in‑the‑loop design, experimentation, and responsible‑AI risk management.
Experience defining experiment hypotheses, measurable outcomes, decision criteria, and scalable handoffs rather than relying on activity‑based measures.
Ability to influence and align stakeholders at all levels of the organization without relying on formal authority.
Exceptional communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to translate complex technical and product concepts into clear decisions for executive, technical, commercial, and customer audiences.
Strong cross‑functional leadership experience with Product, Engineering, UX, Data, Security, Privacy, and go‑to‑market teams.
Comfort operating as a player‑coach: setting strategy while personally driving discovery, prototypes, customer learning, and executive‑ready recommendations.
Demonstrated sound judgment in balancing speed, customer value, technical feasibility, business viability, responsible AI, privacy, security, and long‑term scalability.
Experience building a team, capability, or operating model from the ground up is strongly preferred.
A strong sense of curiosity, resilience, and adaptability, with a track record of learning quickly and challenging established assumptions constructively.

Responsibilities

Co‑Create and lead the vision, strategy, and operating model for AI Labs, connecting experimentation to Paylocity’s broader product, platform, and AI strategy.
Build a portfolio of high‑potential AI opportunities informed by customer needs, market shifts, business priorities, technical feasibility, and responsible‑AI considerations.
Design a disciplined incubation process that moves concepts through problem validation, rapid prototyping, customer testing, measurable experiments, investment decisions, and transition or closure.
Personally lead early discovery and experimentation while establishing the case, structure, and talent plan for the team to grow over time.
Establish clear learning goals, hypotheses, success measures, decision gates, and evidence standards so the organization can invest, pivot, scale, or stop with confidence.
Operate across multiple levels of the organization, from executive leadership to individual contributors, to align stakeholders, remove barriers, and create sponsorship for experiments.
Partner closely with Product, Engineering, UX, Data, Architecture, Security, Privacy, Legal, Operations, Sales, Marketing, Service, and Customer Success to test ideas responsibly and accelerate learning.
Create strong pathways for successful experiments to transition into durable product teams, including a clear product narrative, validated customer value, technical context, risks, metrics, and recommended ownership.
Help define and evolve an AI‑driven PDLC, embedding practical AI use across product discovery, research synthesis, prototyping, requirements, engineering, quality, instrumentation, launch, and iteration.
Identify where AI can improve the speed, quality, and learning velocity of product development while maintaining appropriate human judgment, security, privacy, governance, and quality controls.
Use customer feedback, product data, market intelligence, and experiment results to communicate what was learned and recommend next actions.
Make complex opportunities tangible through prototypes, narratives, demos, business cases, and concise executive communication.
Build reusable methods, tools, templates, and playbooks that strengthen experimentation and AI‑enabled product development across the broader organization.
Foster a culture of curiosity, urgency, constructive challenge, and continuous learning, where teams are rewarded for evidence and outcomes rather than activity.
As the team grows, recruit, lead, mentor, and develop a high‑performing, multidisciplinary group capable of moving between exploration and execution.
Create mechanisms, systems, processes, and leadership practices that reinforce Paylocity values throughout the work.