Lead Forward Deployed Product Manager

Description

The company builds a vertically integrated mortgage platform that turns loan origination into a single API. The U.S. mortgage market is worth $13T, and most of its steps are still done by hand.

Public companies and some of the largest U.S. originators already run on the platform, and revenue is growing every month. Investors include Peter Thiel, Conversion Capital, QED, Citi, Fifth Wall, and the founders of Ramp, Blend, and Mercury.

The team is largely former founders who work with high ownership, debate hard, and deliver results without being told what to do. The pace is fast and the work is demanding.

This is a senior, customer-facing role on a team that embeds with the company's most strategic customers. Each customer runs its mortgage business differently, so the platform has to fit how that customer actually operates.

Responsibilities

• Spend time on site and remotely with strategic customers to learn their teams, systems, and full mortgage workflow
• Map how each customer works today, find where the platform adds the most value, and build a plan to get them live fast
• Own each integration end to end, from scoping and solution design through data mapping, configuration, testing, and launch, working with customer and company engineers
• Find manual steps, workarounds, and bottlenecks in customer processes and replace them with the platform
• Write and ship code, including integrations, scripts, configurations, internal tools, and agents on the platform, and commit changes to the core codebase when a customer needs them
• Bring field findings to the product team, separate one-off requests from features for the core platform, and help build the latter
• Be accountable for each engagement: set goals with customer executives and technical leaders, align everyone, make hard calls, and hold both sides to results
• Advise customer leadership on modernizing mortgage operations, and work with GTM and Account Management on deals, relationships, and customer success
• Define and track success for each customer, including time to go live, adoption, loan volume, and efficiency gains
• Build playbooks and reusable tools so each integration moves faster than the last
• Set the deployment standard and help hire, mentor, and grow the forward deployed team
• Use AI in your daily work

Requirements

• You hold clear views, defend them to customers and colleagues, and change your mind when shown you are wrong
• You set strict priorities, focus on what gets customers live and creates the most value, and say no to good ideas that come at the wrong time
• You are at ease in a heavily regulated market, follow the rules fully, and work with regulators to improve outcomes for borrowers
• You care deeply about customers and their borrowers and set a high bar for both
• You prefer software to manual work. Any human step in the back-end mortgage process is a bug to you, and when a temporary workaround is needed, you document it and push for a permanent fix
• You build strong working relationships with loan officers, operations staff, engineers, and executives, both at customers and inside the company
• You generate ideas about the product, customers, and team, and you act on them
• You learn mortgage quickly and dig into the details of each customer's business until you know it as well as their own team does
• 8+ years in software, in roles such as forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, technical product management, management consulting, or implementation consulting
• You have led complex, high-stakes enterprise projects from scoping through launch with measurable business results
• You have worked directly with C-suite executives and senior technical leaders, and they take your input seriously
• You can lead in the room, deliver hard news, and keep large groups aligned
• You write code, commit to production codebases, work with customer engineering teams, and use APIs and data
• You quickly understand complex business workflows and turn them into clear product requirements
• You handle ambiguity and manage several customers at once
• You can write SQL
• You have built or deployed 0-1 enterprise software in a regulated industry
• You travel regularly to customer sites
• Nice to have: mortgage, lending, or fintech experience, or experience with mortgage systems such as loan origination systems
• You do not need to be a mortgage expert on day one, but over time you need to become one of the most trusted mortgage experts on the team
• You must live in or be willing to relocate to Palo Alto (CA) or New York City

Conditions

Customer travel is regular, with on-site work at customer locations

Based in Palo Alto (CA) or New York City, or willing to relocate to one of them