Own the roadmap, strategy, architecture decisions, developer experience, and adoption metrics for a core Viam platform area. Lead capabilities from problem definition through customer deployment, including migrations and deprecations. Partner with engineering, senior leadership, customers, and forward-deployed engineers to identify bottlenecks and shape platform direction. The role requires software engineering experience, strong technical credibility, developer-facing product expertise, market research skills, and interest in hardware or physical systems.
About Viam
Founded by Eliot Horowitz, co-founder and former CTO of MongoDB, Viam is a novel robotics engineering platform that lets you configure, control, and manage robots intuitively and quickly. We’re inspiring a generation of engineers to solve complicated automation problems with our uniquely powerful suite of software tools.
We’re a ~100-person company headquartered in New York City.
Hybrid 3 days/week in NYC office
We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager to own a core area of the Viam platform. You’ll set the roadmap for your area, define how product and engineering make decisions together, and partner with senior leadership on strategy: what keeps developers from adopting Viam, which experiences become bottlenecks, and where physical AI and robotics are heading with respect to how software engineers get involved.
You have worked as a software engineer, which is a hard requirement here; the role sits close enough to the code that it does not work otherwise. Prior robotics or IoT experience isn’t required, but you should be excited to work close to hardware and physical systems.
What you’ll do:- Own the roadmap for your area of the platform, from problem definition through launch and adoption, and decide what ships, what waits, and what gets deprecated.
- Collaborate on product strategy: what keeps developers from adopting Viam, and which experiences become bottlenecks or blockers.
- Develop a view on where physical AI and robotics are heading, and what that means for how software engineers get involved.
- Work with engineering leads on the decisions that shape platform architecture, like what belongs in the core, in the registry, or in an SDK.
- Take new capabilities from 0 to 1 and stay on them through real customer deployments.
- Own the developer experience for your area, including SDK ergonomics, API surface, docs, and onboarding.
- Define success against developer adoption and second activations, and use that to decide what to build next and what to cut.
- Bring what you learn from customers and Forward Deployed engineers back into the roadmap, and build the product practice itself as you go.
- Experience as a software engineer, building and shipping production software used by real users, plus 8+ years in product management since. The engineering background is a requirement, not a preference.
- Experience building developer-facing or infrastructure products like APIs, SDKs, or platforms, where the user is an engineer.
- A track record of taking products from ambiguity to production, including migrations, deprecations, and breaking changes that real customers depend on.
- Technical credibility with engineers. You can run the SDK yourself, read the code well enough to ask the right question, and hold your own in a design review.
- Ability to do real market research and form a product strategy from it, rather than execute one handed to you. This includes time spent directly with users in their own environment.
- Comfort defining success metrics and using data to decide what to build next.
- Ability to move quickly, decide with incomplete information, wear whatever hat the week requires, and change direction when the evidence changes.
- Experience working with senior leadership, including setting direction and disagreeing well.
- Hands-on interest in hardware, IoT, embedded systems, or similar physical systems. Professional robotics experience is not required.
The salary for this role is between $180K - $240K /year.
Full-time Benefits
Viam’s base salary range for this role is posted above. In addition to cash compensation, Viam offers a comprehensive Total Rewards package that includes equity grants, health benefits, and more.
- 100% covered medical/dental/vision insurance plans, commuter benefits
- 25 days paid vacation and generous holiday observances
- Free lunch every day that you’re in the office
- One Medical Membership
- Citi Bike memberships
- Monthly wellness stipend to be used for a variety of fitness-related items like gym memberships, fitness classes, fitness equipment, and more
- Paid parental leave
- Reproductive Health Benefits, including Fertility Benefits and Abortion Access Travel Benefits
- Yearly Learning and Development Budget for your own personal learning goals
- Vision Driven
- Collaborate Openly
- Act Decisively
- Succeed Through Diversity
- Hold Ourselves Accountable
- Lead with Curiosity
Viam does not accept unsolicited agency resumes or calls from recruitment agencies or search firms. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias or Viam employees. Viam is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.
Viam New York, New York, USA Office
New York, New York, NY, United States
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