Senior Technical Product Manager - AI & Child Safety

Position Overview The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) is seeking a Senior Technical Product Manager to lead the development, beta testing, launch, and continued evolution of an innovative AI-powered Parent Center focused on helping parents, caregivers, and communities protect children in an increasingly complex digital environment. This is not a traditional project management position. We are looking for a hands-on product leader who understands how modern software is built, has successfully helped bring technology products to market, and can operate effectively between organizational leadership, users, subject-matter experts, and an external software development team. Experience launching AI or LLM-powered products is strongly preferred. The successful candidate will become NCOSE's day-to-day product owner for the Parent Center and will initially lead an important beta deployment involving schools and real-world users. This person must be technically fluent enough to challenge developers, evaluate technical recommendations, understand AI system limitations, identify product risks, and hold an external development firm accountable for quality, schedule, and results. Key Responsibilities Product Leadership Own the Parent Center product from beta through broader deployment. Translate NCOSE's vision, child-safety expertise, stakeholder requirements, and user feedback into actionable product requirements. Develop and maintain the product roadmap, backlog, user stories, priorities, acceptance criteria, and release schedule. Serve as the primary day-to-day product contact between NCOSE leadership and the external development team. Ensure that technology decisions remain aligned with the mission and intended purpose of the Parent Center. Beta Program Design and manage the Parent Center's initial school beta program. Develop structured beta-testing protocols, success metrics, feedback mechanisms, and launch criteria. Coordinate onboarding and communication with participating schools and users. Analyze qualitative and quantitative feedback and translate findings into product improvements. Maintain clear reporting on beta performance, adoption, user experience, defects, risks, and development progress. AI Quality & Evaluation Develop a repeatable evaluation framework for the Parent Center's AI system. Create and maintain test suites covering normal user interactions as well as difficult, ambiguous, adversarial, and high-risk situations. Evaluate areas including: • Response accuracy and usefulness • Hallucinations and unsupported claims • Source quality • Consistency • Appropriate escalation • Child-safety scenarios • Crisis and emergency situations • Sextortion • Grooming • Pornography exposure • Sexting and explicit-image situations • Social media and gaming platforms • School-device concerns • Prompt injection and adversarial behavior • AI-generated sexual exploitation concerns • Privacy and data handling • Guardrails and system boundaries Partner with NCOSE subject-matter experts to ensure the system accurately reflects organizational guidance and child-safety best practices. Establish measurable release thresholds rather than relying solely on subjective assessments that the AI "looks good." Development & Vendor Management Manage NCOSE's relationship with the external development firm at the product level. Hold the development team accountable for: • Deliverables • Engineering estimates • Timelines • Product quality • Defect resolution • Documentation • Release readiness Review proposed technical solutions and ask informed technical questions. Identify unclear estimates, unnecessary complexity, product risks, technical debt, and potential gaps between requirements and delivered functionality. Ensure fixes are validated through regression testing before release. Launch & Product Operations Develop formal criteria for moving from: Internal Testing → School Beta → Expanded Pilot → Production Launch Establish dashboards and reporting covering product health, AI quality, user feedback, open defects, critical issues, development velocity, and launch readiness. Lead post-launch product monitoring and continuous improvement. Help NCOSE develop a long-term strategy for additional AI and digital products. Technical Fluency You do not need to be a software engineer. However, you must be technically fluent enough to communicate effectively with engineers and evaluate technical decisions involving areas such as: • Modern web applications • APIs and integrations • Cloud infrastructure • Databases • Authentication and authorization • Analytics and telemetry • Software development lifecycle • QA and automated testing • AI/LLM systems • Prompt engineering • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) • Model evaluation • AI guardrails • Hallucination mitigation • Observability • Security and privacy You should be comfortable asking a development team to explain an architecture or estimate and capable of recognizing when the explanation is inadequate. Qualifications Required • 6+ years of product management, technical product management, software product leadership, or closely related experience • Demonstrated experience taking a meaningful technology product through development, beta/pilot, and launch • Strong technical fluency and experience working directly with software engineering teams • Experience managing external technology vendors and/or distributed engineering teams • Experience developing product requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, roadmaps, and release plans • Strong QA and analytical mindset • Ability to communicate technical issues clearly to nontechnical executives and stakeholders • Strong organizational skills and personal accountability • Ability to operate effectively in a mission-driven organization where the consequences of poor product decisions can be significant Strongly Preferred • Direct product experience with generative AI or LLM-powered applications • Conversational AI or chatbot experience • Experience with RAG, AI evaluation frameworks, model testing, guardrails, or AI observability • Experience conducting AI red-team or adversarial testing • EdTech or K-12 technology experience • Trust & Safety experience • Child-safety technology experience • Digital health or other high-stakes technology experience • Experience with privacy-sensitive or regulated products Who Will Succeed Here We're interested in people who ask difficult questions. If a developer says something will take six weeks, you want to understand why. If an AI system produces the correct answer 19 times and a dangerous answer the twentieth time, you don't consider the problem solved. If a product works perfectly during a demonstration but fails under unusual real-world conditions, you want to know about those conditions before our users discover them. You should be comfortable telling organizational leadership when a product isn't ready to launch-and equally comfortable telling a development team when their work doesn't meet agreed-upon requirements. You should enjoy building systems, solving difficult problems, testing assumptions, and turning complicated technology into products that real people can confidently use. Why This Role Matters Children and parents are navigating rapidly evolving technologies, platforms, social networks, AI tools, and online risks. The Parent Center is intended to provide parents and caregivers with practical, accessible guidance when they need it-including during situations that can be confusing, frightening, or urgent. That creates an unusually high standard for the technology behind it. NCOSE is looking for someone who wants to help us meet that standard. This position initially centers on successfully bringing the Parent Center through beta and launch, but it also represents an opportunity to help shape NCOSE's broader AI and digital product strategy. Working Environment/Physical Requirements • This is a hybrid position in the DC Office or optional remote. Individuals will be required to sit for long periods, stand, or walk as needed. Also, light lifting - up to 15 pounds. • For remote positions, the individual must work in a quiet space - no background noise - and have the camera turned on during all calls and meetings. • Local travel to meetings, including walking or taking an uber or cab. Occasional out of town travel may be required. Compensation & Benefits Salary is commensurate with experience with a range of $140,000-$165,000. Exceptional candidates may be considered above the posted range. Benefits include generous medical, dental, vision insurance, FSA, 401K, paid time off, and EAP. To Apply: Click "Apply for this Job" at the top of this screen to submit your application. Please include your resume, cover letter, and references.