Product Manager, Technical (Los Altos)

Cheiron

$110K — $130K *
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 3-6 years in product management or technical program management at the individual-contributor level
  • Experience writing build-ready technical specifications that engineering built from
  • Shipped products at a startup or mid-size company with limited resources
  • Ability to read codebases and understand system architecture
  • Fluency with AI tools like Claude Code or Cursor
  • Clear and precise writing skills
  • Strong ability to build mental models for unfamiliar domains

Responsibilities

  • Break product briefs into components and scope builds
  • Write detailed feature stories with acceptance criteria for engineers
  • Review data models and API contracts with existing schema
  • Run specs through engineering and life sciences reviews before handoff
  • Proactively connect with life sciences for regulatory content approval
  • Define correctness for AI-driven features
  • Own product quality for shipped features impacting regulatory decisions

Benefits

  • Work alongside founders and cross-functional teams
  • Opportunity for close collaboration with life sciences experts
  • Gain experience in a specialized industry with regulatory frameworks
  • Chance to develop AI-native products
  • Room for growth in a dynamic startup environment
Full Job Description
Onsite, Los Altos, CA • Product • Full time • 3-6 years experience

The role

You turn product concepts into engineering-ready specs, working across product, life sciences, and engineering. Concepts arrive with the "what" and "why" framed. You own the "how, specifically": how each component fits the existing architecture, what to extend, what to leave alone, and what the build looks like on paper before a line of code is written.

CMC is a specialized world with its own regulatory frameworks and its own workflows. You do not need to know it coming in. You'll have a life sciences team alongside you who own the domain vocabulary and regulatory rules, and you'll learn the domain by working closely with them. What matters is that you're the kind of person who immerses until you can reason from first principles.

You'll work directly with the founders, product/design, life sciences, and engineering teams that are to create impactful products for our customers.

What you will do
  • Break a product brief into its components, define relationships and boundaries with the product team and SMEs, and scope what goes into the build
  • Write numbered feature stories with acceptance criteria, edge cases, and state transitions that an engineer can pick up cold
  • Review data models and API contracts against the existing schema; identify what to extend, what to refactor, and what to leave alone
  • Run specs through review with engineering and the life sciences team before handoff; resolve ambiguity during build rather than letting it travel
  • Connect proactively with the life sciences team for domain input and approval on regulatory content; know when to engage them and when to move independently
  • Define what "correct" looks like for AI-driven features: document extraction, regulatory classification, compliance state derivation
  • Own product quality for shipped features. What you spec goes directly to pharma teams making real regulatory decisions


What we are looking for
  • 3-6 years in product management or technical program management at the individual-contributor level
  • You have written build-ready technical specifications (PRDs with data models, API shapes, state diagrams, acceptance criteria) that engineering built from directly
  • You have shipped at a startup or mid-size company where you had fewer resources and more ambiguity
  • You can read a codebase, reason about system architecture, and ground a spec in what already exists. You are not writing production code daily, but you understand how production systems are built
  • Fluent with AI tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent
  • Clear, precise writing. A stranger reading your spec can implement it without asking you questions.
  • When you encounter an unfamiliar domain or system, your instinct is to build a mental model of how it works before deciding what to change
  • You go deep rather than wide, and you think about your outputs from the perspective of everyone who will read them: engineering, life sciences, etc.


What would make you stand out
  • You have built AI-native products: LLM integrations, structured extraction, agentic workflows, evaluation harnesses, guardrail systems, or knowledge graphs
  • You have taken a complex domain you didn't know (legal, financial, clinical, regulatory) and built products in it. You can describe how you learned the domain well enough to make product decisions beyond sourcing requirements from experts
  • You have experience with document-heavy or data-quality-heavy products: quality systems, regulatory submissions, clinical data, or supply-chain traceability
  • You have defined evaluation frameworks for ML or AI features: what "correct" means, how to measure it, how to build human-in-the-loop review into the product

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