Lead Product Manager, AI Agents

Description

Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services. Our agents automate loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks, captives, and specialty lenders.

We are:

Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding

Cash flow positive and profitable, with mid eight figure ARR achieved in under two years

Already serving more than 20% of the auto lending industry

Processing millions of real customer calls and transactions every day

Fully deployed in production with major financial institutions

Actively expanding into new financial services segments

Building together in person in San Francisco

We are deeply integrated with our customers, own the full technology stack, and move quickly to bring modern AI into regulated industries where precision, reliability, and performance matter.

Responsibilities

• We're hiring the Lead Product Manager for the agent product itself, omni-channel. You will own what the agent can do, how well it does it, and how quickly a new lender can get it live. This is the most important surface at the company, and today it's a set of very capable channels that needs to become one coherent product.
• This is a hands-on role. You'll be listening to call recordings, sitting with servicing teams, writing specs an engineer respects, and defining what "good" means for an agent that talks to people about their money. You'll have the option to build a product team around you over time, but the first year is about your own judgment and throughput.
• What You'll Own
• The roadmap and strategy for the agent across voice, text, email, and chat — including the hard part: making a conversation that starts in one channel finish cleanly in another.
• Agent quality. You define the metrics — containment, resolution rate, escalation, handle time, CSAT, error and hallucination rates — build the evaluation loop, and move the numbers.
• The servicing workflow catalog. Turning payments, payoffs, hardship, collections, title, and insurance from bespoke deployments into configurable product.
• Time-to-live. Getting a new lender from signed to in-production faster every quarter.
• Guardrails and compliance posture in the product: disclosures, audit trails, human handoff thresholds, and the design decisions that keep us inside FDCPA, TCPA, UDAAP, and state servicing rules.
• The bar for discovery, specs, and instrumentation that the rest of the product org will inherit.

Requirements

• You've shipped LLM-powered products to real users — not demos. You can reason about prompting, evals, retrieval, tool use, and latency/cost tradeoffs, and you know where models break.
• You own outcomes, not artifacts. You move fast, decide with incomplete information, and are comfortable being the most accountable person in the room.
• You go to the source. You'll listen to hundreds of calls and sit with ops teams because that's where the real workflow lives.
• You're rigorous about measurement. You can tell a model problem from a product problem from a data problem.
• You hold your own with engineers. You can read a trace, debate an architecture decision, and write a spec that doesn't need translating.
• You have instincts for risk. You know how to design a system that's allowed to be wrong sometimes without that being catastrophic.
• You can say no to a large customer and keep the relationship.
• You write and present clearly enough to stand in front of a lender's risk committee.
• Voice, IVR, contact center, or conversational AI experience — telephony constraints, barge-in, latency budgets, transcription error, call QA.
• Background in lending, servicing, collections, or adjacent financial operations.
• Experience hiring or mentoring product managers.
• Why This Role
• Most AI product roles are features bolted onto an existing business. This is the product. The agent is the company, the market is enormous and underserved, and the problems are genuinely hard — real-time voice, regulated conversations, and a quality bar set by people's mortgages and car payments. You'll have the scope to define how an entire industry talks to its customers.
• At Salient, we’re building at the edge of AI - fast, focused, and with real ownership. Sprints and major launches move quickly, and we look for people who are energized by that pace. Our team typically works around 60 hours per week , beginning at 8:00 AM , with four days spent collaborating in person at our San Francisco office.
• We also offer a benefits package designed to support our full-time employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage , a generous 401(k) , and catered lunches .