Principal Product Manager, Search & Contract Understanding

ironcladhq; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 252,000 - 315,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for employees

Parental leave

Maven family forming support

Paid time off

Wellbeing stipends

Mental health support

Commuter benefits

Employer 401(k) match

Job summary

Ironclad in San Francisco is seeking a Principal Product Manager to set multi-year direction for two connected halves of our AI platform: Search and Contract Understanding. You will own end-to-end search quality and the extraction-backed understanding that powers precise retrieval across a contract repository.

This leadership role involves partnering with engineering, applied science, design, legal, and GTM teams, shaping data schemas, APIs, and the AI quality flywheel.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of PM experience in a technically complex, business-critical product.
• Experience shipping production search or information retrieval products and AI/ML.
• Fluency with retrieval, ranking, LLMs, extraction, APIs.
• Exceptional quantitative judgment for search relevance and recall.
• Platform-scale instincts and ownership of customer outcomes.
• Ability to influence executives and align teams.
• Experience with search, document AI, or legal tech is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own search quality end to end.
• Translate structured understanding into high-recall, high-precision queries.
• Own extraction quality end to end across import to export.
• Model relationships in a contract and capture interconnected data.
• Define APIs, schemas, and developer experience for a unified service.
• Build data quality flywheel with datasets, evals, metrics and gates.
• Lead through influence and align cross-functional partners.

Skills

Product management

Search/IR experience

AI/ML systems

APIs and data models

Executive stakeholder management

Cross-functional leadership

Instrumentation and metrics

Job description

Build AI contracting at enterprise scale. Ship it fast.

Ironclad is building AI on one of the most consequential datasets in enterprise software: over 2 billion contracts across thousands of the world's largest organizations. Contracts run every dollar, deal, and business relationship on the planet, and the AI transformation of this space is still largely uncharted. Engineers here are building agentic solutions to problems that haven't been solved yet, in a category that's still being defined. The feedback loop is short, the data is rich, and the people closest to the work are the ones deciding what gets built next. That ability to deliver impact quickly is why the the companies at the forefront of AI choose Ironclad to manage their contracts.

We’re consistently recognized as a leader in the industry: a Leader in the Forrester Wave and Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contract Lifecycle Management, a Fortune Great Place to Work, and one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Workplaces. Ironclad has also been named to Forbes’ AI 50 and Business Insider’s list of Companies to Bet Your Career On. We’re backed by leading investors including Accel, Y Combinator, Sequoia, BOND, and Franklin Templeton. For more information, visit www.ironcladapp.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

This is a hybrid role. Office attendance is required at least twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays for collaboration and connection. There may be additional in-office days for team or company events.

About this role:

This is one of the most consequential product roles at Ironclad. You'll set the multi-year direction for two deeply connected halves of our AI platform, split roughly evenly: Search and Contract Understanding. On the search side, you own how customers and agents find and retrieve the right knowledge across their entire contract repository. On the understanding side, you own the extraction and document understanding systems that turn contracts into accurate, structured, actionable knowledge. The two reinforce each other: the richer and more structured our contract understanding, the more powerful, precise, and trustworthy Search becomes. Getting this right is fundamental to Ironclad's position as the leading AI contracting platform.

As a Principal PM, you operate as a force multiplier. You'll define the strategy and technical product direction that other teams build against. You'll own search quality end to end, driving relevance, ranking, and recall, and turn structured understanding into precise, high-recall queries across a customer's repository. You'll own extraction quality from document import to structured data to export, go deeper than flat properties to capture the relationships between clauses, terms, and contracts, and shape how that data is built once and served to every team that depends on it. You'll partner across engineering, applied science, design, legal experts, and GTM, and you'll set direction in ambiguity that others can execute against with confidence.

Responsibilities:

• Own search quality end to end. Set the vision, roadmap, and OKRs for search, and stay accountable for relevance, ranking, and recall so users and agents reliably surface the right contracts and clauses.
• Turn understanding into precise retrieval. Translate structured contract understanding into high-recall, high-precision queries across a customer's entire repository, and close the loop so richer understanding continuously raises search quality.
• Own extraction quality end to end. Stay accountable for extraction accuracy, depth, and coverage from import through export, including long documents, multi-agreement detection, and bulk extraction.
• Model the relationships in a contract. Move from flat properties to a connected representation that captures clauses, topics, intra- and inter-contract relationships, and negotiation history, so search and agents reason relationally and with high recall.
• Build the data once, serve it everywhere. Define the APIs, schemas, and developer experience that let every client team, starting with search, build on a single, consistent understanding service.
• Own the AI quality flywheel. Build the datasets, evals, production metrics, regression gates, and feedback loops that separate benchmark scores from real production quality across search and extraction.
• Lead through influence. Make consequential technical calls (retrieval architecture, model choices, vendors, build-versus-buy) and align engineering, design, data, executives, and partners around clear decisions and accountable execution.

Qualifications:

• 10+ years of product management experience of a technically complex, business-critical product area with company-level impact.
• Deep experience shipping production search or information retrieval products, and production AI/ML, developer platform, or data infrastructure products.
• Practical fluency with retrieval and ranking, LLM systems, extraction, APIs, data models, evaluation methods, latency, and cost.
• Exceptional quantitative judgment, including the ability to reason about search relevance and recall, and to build offline benchmark performance from production traces.
• Platform instincts at scale: you solve immediate needs while extracting durable, shared capabilities that many teams depend on.
• A history of owning customer-facing outcomes and deep infrastructure in the same mandate.
• Enterprise-product judgment that incorporates trust, scale, and compliance.
• Demonstrated ability to influence and align executives, and to raise the bar for the PMs and engineers around you.
• Experience with search or retrieval systems, document AI, knowledge graphs, and/or legal tech, is a plus.

Base Salary Range: $252,000 - $315,000; offers company bonus

The base salary range represents the minimum and maximum of the salary range for this position based at our San Francisco headquarters. The actual base salary offered for this position will depend on numerous factors, including individual proficiency, anticipated performance, and the location of the selected candidate. Our base salary is just one component of Ironclad’s competitive total rewards package, which also includes equity awards (a new hire grant, along with opportunities for additional awards throughout your tenure), competitive health and wellness benefits, and a commitment to career growth and development.

US Full-Time Employee Benefits at Ironclad:

• 100% health coverage for employees (medical, dental, and vision), and 75% coverage for dependents with buy-up plan options available
• Market-leading leave policies, including gender-neutral parental leave and compassionate leave
• Family forming support through Maven for you and your partner
• Paid time off - take the time you need, when you need it
• Monthly stipends for wellbeing, hybrid work, and (if applicable) cell phone use
• Mental health support through Modern Health, including therapy, coaching, and digital tools
• Pre-tax commuter benefits (US Employees)
• 401(k) plan with Fidelity with employer match (US Employees)
• Regular team events to connect, recharge, and have fun
• And most importantly: the opportunity to help build the company you want to work at

**UK Employee-specific benefits are included on our UK job postings

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.