Location:- San Francisco / Hybrid - The role is based in the SF Bay area and we'd require you to be at our Berkeley HQ office at least 2 days per week.
About the Role:Sardine is looking for a Product Lead to lead our efforts around Agentic commerce. Personal Agents have taken the world by storm and this year's Black Friday and Holiday shopping might be the first one where Agents shop in large numbers.
However, fundamental problems around customer experience, successful conversion, chargeback resolution and fraud prevention still remain. Agents still get blocked by merchants because most Agents behave like Bots. Sardine classifies many AI agents and differentiates them from bots. Sardine's innovative proposal on Know Your Human allows both agents and merchants to understand the identity of the human behind an agent.
In this role, you will own Sardine's product on Agentic commerce end-to-end.
This is an ideal role for a prior founder or someone who's been itching to found something new. We will give you the support and GTM resources to build a new business line from the ground-up.
What you'll be doingOwn the agentic commerce roadmap and build the product that lets merchants welcome trusted AI agents while keeping fraud out:
- Be directly responsible for the revenue goal for Agentic commerce. We are ambitious and want you and your team to hit $10M ARR in year 1.
- Own the strategy and roadmap for agentic commerce: identifying AI agents, separating trusted agents from bad bots, and giving merchants clear controls to allow, challenge, or block them.
- Define success around conversion for legitimate agent traffic, with false positives and fraud loss as the guardrails.
- Work with data science and engineering on detection signals, models, and the Sardine SDK, and write specs that engineers can build from.
- Build partnerships across the payments ecosystem, including merchants, PSPs, card networks, and AI agent platforms.
- Lead go-to-market with the founders and sales: pricing, packaging, design partners, pilots, and launch.
- Sell and support both enterprises and developers, including developer-first onboarding, documentation, and a self-serve path.
- Work day to day with the fraud, compliance, and customer teams, and bring customer feedback back into the roadmap.
What you'll need- 5+ years of product management experience, with a record of shipping AI products where ML or GenAI capabilities sit inside real user workflows.
- A strong payments background: card networks, acquiring and issuing, checkout flows, and how fraud and conversion trade off.
- Fluency with ML concepts such as models, experimentation, metrics, and trade-offs, so you can work closely with data science.
- Technical depth to design APIs and SDKs and to prototype with AI tools yourself.
- Experience taking a product to market and selling to both enterprises and developers.
- Strong analytical skills, and the judgment to balance data with intuition.
- Clear, direct communication with founders, engineers, and customers.
Bonus- Experience in fraud, risk, bot detection, or device intelligence.
- Founding or early-stage startup experience.
- Prior work on agentic payments, agent identity, or merchant checkout protocols.
- Experience running pricing, packaging, and pilot programs for a new product line.
- SQL or Python skills for your own data analysis.
Interview processAll interviews at Sardine involve a Take Home project. We are sharing what we are looking for in the Take Home.
We want you to code a personal Agent, a wallet or a merchant. We want you to integrate Sardine's products around fraud prevention. Think of the friction that currently exists in Agentic payments. Then in your project show that friction and also show your proposal on countering that friction. You can view some ideas on how we have vibe coded KYH on the agent side, merchant side or bank side in the demo videos.
If you are interested in applying for this position, please include an idea for what you want to build in your application. After we receive your interest, we will respond back with access to our API docs. Note that our API docs are not public to prevent exposing how we prevent fraud to fraudsters.
Benefits we offer:- Generous compensation in cash and equity
- Early exercise for all options, including pre-vested
- Work from anywhere: Remote-first Culture
- Flexible paid time off and Year-end break
- Health insurance, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents - US and Canada specific
- 4% matching in 401k / RRSP - US and Canada specific
- MacBook Pro delivered to your door
- One-time stipend to set up a home office - desk, chair, screen, etc.
- Monthly meal stipend
- Monthly social meet-up stipend
- Annual health and wellness stipend
- Annual Learning stipend
