Product Manager

CodeHS, Inc.; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 100,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

CodeHS, Inc. is seeking our first product manager to join the engineering team in Chicago. You will own a product area end-to-end from concept to launch, shaping it with teachers, districts, and customers, and coordinating with engineers to deliver the right solution. This is a growth-focused, high-ownership role in a hybrid environment, with in-person collaboration.

Job description

CodeHS is a comprehensive platform helping K-12 schools teach computer science. We provide curriculum, professional development, and a full software platform. CodeHS is used by millions of students and thousands of schools and districts around the US and the world.

Mission

The mission of CodeHS is to empower all students to meaningfully impact the future. We believe that in the 21st century, coding is a foundational skill, just like reading and writing. That's why we say: Read, Write, Code. Coding and computer science are essential skills for students to learn and schools to teach.

Location

Chicago - our River North office, five days a week. Reports to Zach Galant, CTO & co-founder.

CodeHS is hybrid overall. We have people in other offices and people who work remotely, and you'll work with them regularly. This role is in person because it depends on coming up to speed quickly - on the product, on our customers, and on how the engineering team works - and that happens faster sitting next to people. So does mentorship. We want someone who wants to work that way and is excited about getting to work in person in the office.

We're hiring our first product manager to work inside the engineering team.

We have about fifteen engineers in small project teams that re-form each cycle, and we ship constantly. What limits our impact usually isn't engineering capacity - it's conviction about what to build, why, and how to communicate it to the rest of the team and our customers. We want someone who can get that conviction from teachers, districts, the market, our data, and our own team, and turn it into something engineering can act on.

This is not a people management role.

The role

You own a product area end-to-end from concept to launch. Most likely a newer bet where we're still working out the shape of it, though it could be an existing surface that needs more attention, or a few smaller ones. We'll decide together once you're here and have completed onboarding. Either way the goal is that you build up experience and domain expertise in that area and act like an owner.

You'll sit with our engineering managers as a peer. You'll run small teams of engineers with a focus area and are responsible for keeping them on track and ensuring that we build the right thing.

This is our first formal product role, so you have an opportunity to help shape what the product function can do and how it fits within engineering and the company more broadly.

How you work

You build. When you have an idea, go make a version of it. Not production code - a working prototype you drove an AI coding agent to build. Engineers review and take it to completion.

You write things down. Specs, product briefs, the reasoning behind a decision. If it isn't written down here, it doesn't count.

You talk to the people who use this. Much of the work is strategy and synthesis. But when the answer is in a classroom or on a call with a district, you go. It isn't a heavy travel role, but you will need to join calls, talk to people on the team and customers, and build an understanding beyond just reasoning through things on your own.

You connect engineering to everyone else. Sales, customer success, support, and curriculum all have product or tooling needs. Your job is to gather the information, synthesize it, and use that to inform what the right things are to build.

You should be

Comfortable being technical, without necessarily having been an engineer. You can read a pull request and argue about a tradeoff without needing it translated. When an engineer raises an issue or blocker, you can ask a useful second question to move us back in the right direction.

Fluent with AI, and adaptive to how things are changing. You use AI to guide your thinking and move quickly, but you don't hide behind it for judgment. You should be prototyping with coding agents, running research and synthesis through them, and building yourself tools. You should also be able to describe a time the model was confidently wrong and you caught it. You use AI to be more ambitious and raise the bar for quality.

High agency. No one hands you a backlog. If you need something to exist, you make it exist.

A clear communicator. We're a bottom-line-up-front company. Say the thing first. Make it easy for others to reply to you.

Compensation and benefits

Salary range: $100,000 - $140,000 base, depending on level and experience.