Director of Product

About the role

This role sits at the center of Recidiviz's ability to scale. As a Director of Product, you'll lead and develop a team of experienced product managers — people with years of domain expertise, strong opinions, and a deep commitment to the mission. Your job is to make each of them sharper, more supported, and more impactful: setting the strategic context that guides their work, building the people systems that help them grow, and creating the conditions for them to do the best work of their careers. You'll report to the Chief Impact Officer and serve as a key partner on product direction, team health, and the org design decisions that will shape Recidiviz as it grows toward national scale. Some travel to our state partners, internal team gatherings, and offsites is expected.

Core responsibilities

• Lead, develop, and build a high-performing PM team. Manage and mentor experienced PMs and emerging leaders — including senior ICs who own product areas deeply and those growing toward management. Own the full hiring engine from sourcing to close: pipeline development, interview design, and offer process. You run a high-performing team, and you measure your success by the growth and impact of the people around you.
• Build the systems that give the team clarity and stability. Partner with People Ops to own and evolve the career ladder, performance frameworks, and onboarding that make this team feel like a place worth building a career. You know what great looks like at every level and you make that visible.
• Build the cross-functional trust that makes great product work possible. Partner closely with engineering, design, data science, and policy and coach the PMs to do the same. Collaborate with executive leadership and state government stakeholders, and help the team stay close to frontline staff and the people most affected by the criminal justice system.
• Set the strategic context that guides the team's work. Define a clear direction for the PM team — helping each PM understand where their area fits in the bigger picture, what to prioritize, and why it matters. Help PMs define strategies for their areas, translate ambiguity into clear priorities, and make more confident product calls. You are the reason the team always knows what they're working toward and the org has clarity on our product strategy.
• Move the team toward the future of product. AI is reshaping what it means to be a PM — and your job is to help the team stay ahead of that shift. Champion and model AI-assisted workflows across discovery, scoping, and prototyping. Set standards for using these tools with judgment, not just speed. Develop the adaptability and craft that will make your PMs exceptional long after their time at Recidiviz.

Wild success

Here are a few things you might accomplish in your first year that would demonstrate wild success in this role. Some of these will be the direct result of your work. Others will be because of the conditions you've set for a great team to do great things — which is just as important.

• The topline is moving: Recidiviz's overall product portfolio has deepening impact — better outcomes, higher tool usage, more support from client executives, improved CSAT, steady launch momentum. You didn't build all of it, but the team that did was sharper, more supported, and more strategically grounded because of you.
• Multiple PMs have grown into a meaningfully new scope — a first-time manager, a senior IC owning a harder problem, someone who was stuck and is now thriving. The team can see a credible path forward because they've watched someone walk it.
• XFN partners, like engineering, design, marketing, are proactively pulling PMs into hard decisions earlier, not because they're required to, but because the PM team has become the kind of thought partner people actually want in the room.
• Hiring lag is eliminated. You've built a pipeline that moves fast without sacrificing quality, and Recidiviz is no longer a bottleneck on its own growth.
• Onboarding time-to-productivity is fast. New PMs are contributing meaningfully within their first month because the infrastructure matches the quality of the team they're joining.
• Everyone at Recidiviz — not just the PM team — can articulate where the product is going and why. Strategic clarity has become a property of the org, not just a document.

Minimum qualifications

• Deep care for the growth and wellbeing of the people you manage — you measure your success by theirs
• 10+ years in product management, with at least 5 years managing a team; you've led both senior ICs and emerging leaders and know how to get the best from each
• Exceptional communication and relationship skills — you earn trust quickly, especially with people who have strong opinions and high standards
• Experience coaching PMs toward management readiness — you've developed future managers, not just individual contributors
• Comfort operating in ambiguity, with the ability to create clarity and momentum where little exists
• Proven ability to build people systems from scratch — career ladders, performance frameworks, onboarding programs — in a fast-moving environment
• Experience running recruiting at scale: pipeline building, interview design, and closing candidates in a competitive market
• Strong strategic instincts: you can zoom out to see the system, identify what's misaligned, and help teams make better decisions with less friction
• A builder's mindset paired with strategic rigor — you see gaps, you close them, and you leave things better than you found them
• Ability and willingness to travel, about one trip per quarter

Preferred qualifications

• Experience navigating complex, multi-stakeholder environments where end users, administrative buyers, and institutional partners each have distinct needs — and where building trust with all of them is part of the job.
• Experience working in or closely with mission-driven, nonprofit, or public sector organizations
• Personal or professional experience working with the criminal justice system
• Experience in a high-growth startup where the playbook was still being written
• Exposure to AI-assisted product development and the unique team dynamics it creates
• A track record of elevating strong ICs into more strategic, senior thinkers — not just promoting people, but genuinely shaping their craft

Compensation

Compensation is standardized based on roles and responsibilities. This ensures equitable compensation and responsible stewardship of our resources. As such, we do not negotiate compensation offers.

The compensation for this role is: $201,250.

What we offer

• Effective, extremely thoughtful colleagues, working together on a mission that matters
• 90% medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage for you and your dependents
• Flexible time off, including 20 days of PTO, 3 days of paid volunteering time, and 13 paid holidays per year
• 401(k) retirement plan with 5% company match and no vesting period
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• Complimentary One Medical membership (availability based on location)
• Partnership with Carrot to provide employees with inclusive fertility and family-forming benefits, as well as a small but growing number of hormonal health and gender-affirming care benefits
• Monthly ClassPass credit for personal wellness
• Free mental health support via Talkspace
• Well-located offices in Oakland and Manhattan, with the flexibility to work remotely or go into either office as you choose
• An annual company offsite and other ad-hoc gatherings
• All the exhilarating challenges and stretch opportunities of a tech startup, combined with the mission-driven heart of a nonprofit

More about Recidiviz

Recidiviz was an all-volunteer effort until early 2019, when Clementine, Andrew, and Joshua founded the organization. Since then, we've built an A-team of software engineers, designers, product managers and domain experts, from companies like Google, Apple, Dropbox, Opower, and Sidewalk Labs. Recidiviz was part of Y-Combinator's 2019 class and has received support from some of the most respected philanthropists and foundations, including Ford Foundation, Mackenzie Scott, Schmidt Futures, Arnold Ventures, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Mozilla Foundation.

Today, Recidiviz works with (and earns revenue from) over 19 state partners — big and small, red and blue — and touches over 45% of the country's incarcerated population. We have helped to get hundreds of thousands of people out of the criminal justice system, safely and equitably.

To learn more about how we do what we do, check out our2025 Year in Review, read somepress coverage, or watch ourTED Talk.

An important note

Lasting change is always built on diversity. Recidiviz recruits, employs, trains, compensates and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, veteran status, ancestry, citizenship, marital status, gender identity and all protected status as required by applicable law. We consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a special need that requires accommodation, please let us know in your application. Even if you don't think you meet all the criteria above, drop your resume, and we'll take a look — you might be great for another role or another time!

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