Founding Product Manager

Ultra; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Ultra is seeking its first product hire to own the customer experience end to end and define the roadmap for our software ecosystem. You will work across hardware and software teams, spending time on warehouse floors to learn how our robots and software are actually used, then translate those insights into shipped features.

Location: on-site in New York City with frequent travel. You’ll shape what product means at Ultra, prioritize specs, and build a platform that scales from tens to thousands

Qualifications

• Must ship great software products with 5–10+ years of experience.
• Experience working with hardware or hardware-adjacent products.
• Fluency with Agile product development and close collaboration with engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the roadmap and defend decisions with evidence.
• Be the voice of the customer, embedding with users on-site.
• Design and prototype directly, iterating with customers.
• Ship with engineering: move from prototype to production with clear priorities.
• Own the hardware/software seam, addressing latency, faults, and safety states.
• Serve every user type with a single, scalable platform.
• Support GTM by helping sales and leadership translate vision into value.
• Communicate clearly about what we're building to customers and partners.

Skills

Roadmap ownership

Voice of customer

Prototype design

Cross-functional collaboration

Technical literacy

Strong communication

Founder experience

Tools

Cursor

Claude Code

Job description

About the Role

As our first product hire, you'll own the customer experience end to end and set the roadmap for Ultra's software ecosystem. Our robots are half of what we sell; the software our customers live in is the other half. A warehouse associate uses it to start and monitor a job. A site supervisor uses it to see what ran, what faulted, and what it cost. An operations director compares last week to this week across facilities. A CEO uses it to decide whether to sign for fifty more robots. Four very different users, four different definitions of "working," and all of them have to trust the same system.

This is a horizontal role. You'll work across hardware and software engineering, autonomy, deployments, operations, sales, and leadership. You'll spend real time on warehouse floors with the people who use our robots and bring what you learn back into what we ship. You're expected to build, not just specify - conceptualize, design, prototype, and hand engineering something concrete.

You’ll also define what product means at Ultra: what a spec is, how we prioritize, how we decide something is done. We're going from tens of robots to hundreds and then thousands over the next few years. The platform that makes that sticky is yours to build.

Location: This is an on-site role based in New York City, with frequent travel.

What You’ll Do

• Own the roadmap: Decide what we build for customers and in what order, and defend those decisions with evidence rather than opinion.
• Be the voice of the customer: Embed on-site with associates, supervisors, and operators. Watch how our robots and software actually get used, then make sure what you learn is incorporated in what we ship.
• Design and prototype: Go from problem to working interface yourself. Design it, build it in Cursor or Claude Code, put it in-front of a customer, and iterate.
• Ship with engineering: Work directly with our software team to go from prototype to production. Make priorities and the reasoning behind them obvious to the people building.
• Own the hardware/software seam: Latency, faults, teleop handoffs, safety states, and what happens when a robot drops something are product problems, not just engineering ones.
• Serve every user type: Build one platform that works for a warehouse associate at 2am and an executive reviewing spend at quarter end.
• Support GTM: Join customer calls, demos, and pilots. Help sales and leadership translate what we're building into why it matters.
• Communicate externally: Write and speak clearly about what we're building - to customers, partners, and the world.

Who You Are

• A builder: You'd rather show a working prototype than write a document about one. You have design taste and can produce yourself.
• An AI power user: Cursor, Claude Code, whatever is fastest this month. These are daily tools for you.
• Credible with engineers: You can hold a room, make priorities and the reasoning behind them clear, and do it with real empathy for how product actually gets built.
• Technically literate: You don't need to write production code, but you can understand how our autonomy stack, software stack, and robots work, and why certain things are hard.
• A strong communicator: You can explain a technical idea to a CTO, a skeptical warehouse manager, and a room of investors in the same day.
• Bonus: You're a former founder

Experience and Skills

• 5-10+ years shipping great software products.
• Experience with hardware or hardware-adjacent products - robotics, devices, industrial, medical, automotive, or logistics. Our software is tightly coupled to a physical machine.
• Fluency with agile product development and working day to day with engineering teams.
• Comfortable analyzing product and operational data to decide what to build next.