Founding Product Manager

ABOUT THE ROLE

As our first product hire, you'll own the customer experience end to end and set

the roadmap for Ultra's software ecosystem. Our robots are half of what we sell;

the software our customers live in is the other half. A warehouse associate uses

it to start and monitor a job. A site supervisor uses it to see what ran, what

faulted, and what it cost. An operations director compares last week to this

week across facilities. A CEO uses it to decide whether to sign for fifty more

robots. Four very different users, four different definitions of "working," and

all of them have to trust the same system.

This is a horizontal role. You'll work across hardware and software engineering,

autonomy, deployments, operations, sales, and leadership. You'll spend real time

on warehouse floors with the people who use our robots and bring what you learn

back into what we ship. You're expected to build, not just specify -

conceptualize, design, prototype, and hand engineering something concrete.

You'll also define what product means at Ultra: what a spec is, how we

prioritize, how we decide something is done. We're going from tens of robots to

hundreds and then thousands over the next few years. The platform that makes

that sticky is yours to build.

Location: This is a on-site role based in New York City, with frequent travel.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

* Own the roadmap: Decide what we build for customers and in what order, and

defend those decisions with evidence rather than opinion.

* Be the voice of the customer: Embed on-site with associates, supervisors, and

operators. Watch how our robots and software actually get used, then make

sure what you learn is incorporated in what we ship.

* Design and prototype: Go from problem to working interface yourself. Design

it, build it in Cursor or Claude Code, put it in-front of a customer, and

iterate.

* Ship with engineering: Work directly with our software team to go from

prototype to production. Make priorities and the reasoning behind them

obvious to the people building.

* Own the hardware/software seam: Latency, faults, teleop handoffs, safety

states, and what happens when a robot drops something are product problems,

not just engineering ones.

* Serve every user type: Build one platform that works for a warehouse

associate at 2am and an executive reviewing spend at quarter end.

* Support GTM: Join customer calls, demos, and pilots. Help sales and

leadership translate what we're building into why it matters.

* Communicate externally: Write and speak clearly about what we're building -

to customers, partners, and the world.

WHO YOU ARE

* A builder: You'd rather show a working prototype than write a document about

one. You have design taste and can produce yourself.

* An AI power user: Cursor, Claude Code, whatever is fastest this month. These

are daily tools for you.

* Credible with engineers: You can hold a room, make priorities and the

reasoning behind them clear, and do it with real empathy for how product

actually gets built.

* Technically literate: You don't need to write production code, but you can

understand how our autonomy stack, software stack, and robots work, and why

certain things are hard.

* A strong communicator: You can explain a technical idea to a CTO, a skeptical

warehouse manager, and a room of investors in the same day.

* Bonus: You're a former founder

EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

* 5-10+ years shipping great software products.

* Experience with hardware or hardware-adjacent products - robotics, devices,

industrial, medical, automotive, or logistics. Our software is tightly

coupled to a physical machine.

* Fluency with agile product development and working day to day with

engineering teams.

* Comfortable analyzing product and operational data to decide what to build

next.