Technical Product Manager, Founding team

Aviator; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health/Dental/Vision

Unlimited vacation policy

Job summary

Aviator, a SF-based startup backed by Y Combinator, is hiring its first product manager to shape the next wave of AI-powered engineering productivity tools. You’ll work closely with the founders in San Francisco, decide what to build, write specs, and prototype ideas with coding agents before a single line of code is written.

Our customers run monorepos with thousands of engineers; you’ll own the roadmap for Verify from discovery to launch and adoption, collaborating with platform, infra and

Qualifications

• 3+ years of product management on developer tools or technical B2B products.
• Experience shipping from zero to one in an early-stage startup.
• Able to read PRs and participate in architecture discussions.
• Strong written communication with engineers and executives.
• Hands-on experience with AI coding tools and opinions on gaps.

Responsibilities

• Own the roadmap for a product area end to end—from discovery to launch and adoption.
• Write clear, opinionated specs that engineers and agents build from.
• Prototype ideas with coding agents to test with users before engineering time.
• Run discovery with platform, infra and DevEx teams across customers.
• Partner with founders on positioning, pricing and packaging, and with engineering on scope and trade-offs.
• Define success metrics for launches and decide the next steps based on data.
• Shape product storytelling through posts, docs, demos and talks.

Skills

Product management

Developer tools

AI tooling

Written communication

Customer empathy

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

About Us

Software engineering is being fundamentally transformed by AI, and we're building the tools to lead that shift. Aviator is creating the engineering productivity supertools that will define how the best teams build software in the AI era. We as strongly believe that we can provide developers with super powers to build faster and better by solving the challenges that they face everyday. We believe the future of software development isn't engineers replaced by AI—it's engineers supercharged by it. Small teams will ship what once required hundreds of people. Complex workflows that took days will complete in minutes. We're building that future. Backed by Y Combinator (S21), we're a small, focused team in San Francisco tackling one of the most important problems in tech: making every engineer dramatically more effective. We are a team of ex-Googlers with background building engineering teams at several fast-growing silicon valley startups. Our platform already powers workflow automation at Slack, Figma, DoorDash, Square and other industry leaders. Square. MergeQueue eliminates merge conflicts and broken builds. FlexReview intelligently routes code reviews. And Runbooks—our newest product—is a collaborative AI agent platform that lets engineering teams automate complex workflows through natural language specs and shared context.

About The Role

We're hiring our first product manager to shape what Aviator builds next, alongside the founders in SF. This person will be an extension of us, the founders, and have the same voice at the table. We think of early hires as having the ethos of being a founder themselves. As a PM, you'll decide what to build, write the specs, and prototype ideas yourself with coding agents before an engineer touches them. Our customers run monorepos with thousands of engineers, custom CI and merge processes nobody fully understands. Now they're adding fleets of coding agents on top. Nobody has a playbook for how review and verification should work in that world. Figuring it out is the job. An ideal candidate is technical enough to debate a design with a staff engineer, sharp enough to find the real problem behind a feature request, and comfortable shipping a working prototype instead of a slide.

What You’ll Do

• Own the roadmap for a product area end to end—starting with Verify—from problem discovery to launch to adoption.
• Write clear, opinionated specs. We build spec-driven products, and we work that way too: your specs are what our engineers and agents build from.
• Prototype ideas yourself with coding agents to test them with users before committing engineering time.
• Run discovery with platform, infra and DevEx teams at our customers, and separate the one-off request from the pattern across ten customers.
• Partner with the founders on positioning, pricing and packaging, and with engineering on scope and trade-offs.
• Define what success looks like for each launch and instrument it. Kill or double down based on what the numbers say.
• Help shape how we talk about the product: launch posts, docs, demos and the occasional conference talk.

We're Looking For Someone Who Has

• 3+ years of product management on developer tools, infrastructure or a technical B2B product—or a software engineering background and the itch to own the "what" and "why."
• Built something for developers before—a dev tool, API, platform, internal tooling or open-source project—and seen firsthand how engineers adopt it, or ignore it.
• Shipped products from zero to one, ideally at an early-stage startup. You're comfortable with unknowns and low structure.
• Real technical depth. You know how CI, code review and merge workflows work, and you can read a PR and follow an architecture discussion.
• Hands-on fluency with AI coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor or Codex. You use them daily, and you have opinions about where they fall short.
• Strong written communication. You can explain a subtle failure mode to a staff engineer and its business impact to a VP in the same meeting.
• Genuine energy for talking to customers. Hearing how engineers actually work energizes you rather than draining you.
• Experience working with platform or DevEx teams, selling to enterprises, or working inside a large monorepo is a plus.

Why you should join us

• Have an impact from day 1. You will be working very closely with the founders every day, and you'll be the first PM—you'll define what the function looks like here.
• Enterprise customers who actively engage on product direction—and you'll be in the room with them, not reading a summary of the call.
• Work on the hardest open question in software right now: how teams trust code when agents write most of it.
• Own the product—drive the product vision, participate in building the early team, and work closely with the users.

Benefits

• Health/Dental/Vision
• Unlimited vacation policy