{"id":2394584,"url":"https://alion.io/job/backops-product-manager-ai-agents","title":"Product Manager, AI Agents","company":{"id":3801726,"name":"Backops","domain":"backops.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/backops-2","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Gem","truth_index":null},"role":"Product","role_family":"Product","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":158000,"max_usd":292000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":2224},"experience_years_min":6,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Copilot","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-05T19:43:12Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-05","last_verified_at":"2026-10-13T12:07:49Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":7,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":7},"description":"About BackOps\nBackOps is building the AI resolution layer for companies that make or move physical goods.\nThe physical economy still runs on a fragmented web of ERPs, WMSs, TMSs, carrier and vendor portals, email, spreadsheets, legacy systems, and the people who know how to hold all of it together. When something breaks, whether a shipment is delayed, an order changes, a claim needs to be filed, a document is missing, someone has to gather context across systems, determine what should happen next, take action, and make sure the problem is actually resolved.\nBackOps automates that work.\nOur platform, Relay, deploys AI operators that understand operational workflows, work across the systems our customers already use, take action, navigate exceptions, and carry work through to resolution. We aren't building another dashboard or copilot. We're building the execution layer that sits between systems and gets the work done.\nWe recently raised a $42M Series B led by Insight Partners, just six months after our Series A, and are scaling across some of the largest companies in logistics, manufacturing, retail, and other industries that power the physical world.\nThe opportunity ahead is much larger than any single workflow or vertical. We're building the infrastructure for AI to operate reliably inside the real world.\nThe Role\nAs Product Manager, AI Agents, you'll define what it means for an AI operator to be truly excellent at operational work.\nThis isn't a role focused on adding AI features to an existing SaaS product.\nAI is the product.\nRelay has to understand an incoming problem, reconstruct context scattered across multiple systems, interpret company-specific rules, determine the right next action, use tools to execute it, recognize when something has gone wrong, know when human judgment is necessary, and carry the work through to a measurable outcome.\nAnd it has to do this in environments where the end user may be a logistics coordinator, warehouse operator, customer service representative, dispatcher, buyer, or operations manager, not an AI expert.\nYou'll own the product systems and experiences that make those agents intelligent, trustworthy, controllable, and increasingly autonomous.\nThis is a senior individual contributor role for someone who wants to help define a new category of software from first principles.\nWhat You'll Own\nDefine how BackOps agents work\nOwn product strategy across the agent lifecycle: how agents understand work, reason about it, take action, handle ambiguity, recover from failure, learn from outcomes, and collaborate with humans.\nYou'll help answer fundamental questions such as:\nWhat context does an agent need to make the right decision?\nWhich parts of a workflow should be deterministic and which should be agentic?\nWhen should an agent act autonomously versus request approval?\nHow should agents interpret SOPs, business rules, historical outcomes, and unstructured information?\nHow should an agent behave when reality doesn't match the documented process?\nHow do we make agent behavior configurable without forcing customers to become prompt engineers?\nTurn messy operations into great products\nThe workflows BackOps automates were rarely designed cleanly in the first place.\nYou'll spend time with customers and operators understanding how work really happens, including the workarounds, exceptions, judgment calls, and tribal knowledge that never appear in an SOP.\nThen you'll determine what the best AI-native version of that workflow should be.\nYou'll work across areas like order management, shipment exceptions, claims, billing, document processing, scheduling, vendor coordination, and entirely new categories we haven't built yet.\nThe objective isn't to reproduce the manual process step for step.\nIt's to build a better one.\nOwn the quality bar for production AI\nFor traditional software, you can usually define what the product will do.\nFor AI products, you have to define what good looks like and build systems for continuously determining whether you're achieving it.\nYou'll own the product strategy for agent quality, partnering with engineering to develop:\nEvaluation frameworks and success criteria\nGolden datasets and representative test cases\nSimulation and regression testing\nHuman evaluation and annotation\nLLM-based evaluation where appropriate\nProduction quality monitoring\nFailure taxonomies and root-cause loops\nFeedback systems that turn real-world outcomes into better agent behavior\nYou'll define the domain-specific quality bar; our platform team will help build the infrastructure that makes evaluating and operating agents at scale possible.\nDesign human + AI collaboration\nThe goal isn't autonomy for autonomy's sake.\nSome tasks should happen automatically. Some require approval. Some need a human because judgment or accountability matters.\nYou'll define those boundaries and build experiences that allow operators to understand what Relay is doing, trust it, correct it when necessary, and progressively hand over more work as confidence grows.\nGreat AI UX at BackOps might mean making something disappear entirely. It might also mean showing exactly the right context at exactly the right moment for a five-second human decision.\nKnowing the difference is core to this job.\nMake intelligence compound\nEvery workflow creates data about how operations actually function: which exceptions occur, where people intervene, which decisions work, where processes break, and what ultimately resolves the issue.\nYou'll help determine how BackOps turns that data into a product advantage, improving agent quality, workflow design, and customer outcomes over time.\nMeasure outcomes, not demos\nYou'll define and own metrics such as:\nEnd-to-end resolution rate\nNo-touch / autonomous resolution rate\nTask accuracy and quality\nHuman intervention and escalation rate\nTime to resolution\nFailure and recovery patterns\nCustomer adoption and trust\nOperational impact generated for customers\nA compelling demo is useful.\nA production system that completes mission-critical work every day is the standard.\nWhat We're Looking For\nYou may be a strong fit if you:\nHave 6+ years of relevant product-building experience, with meaningful ownership at the Senior or Staff level.\nHave shipped AI/ML, LLM, agentic, automation, or other technically sophisticated products into production and owned the outcome, not simply added an AI feature to an existing roadmap.\nUnderstand the unique challenges of non-deterministic products: evaluation, quality measurement, grounding, tool use, context, failure modes, guardrails, human escalation, and continuous improvement.\nHave exceptional product instincts and can take a complicated workflow and make the resulting user experience feel obvious.\nAre technically fluent enough to work deeply with engineers and AI practitioners without outsourcing the hard product decisions to them.\nHave built zero-to-one products or substantially rethought how an existing category should work.\nStay extraordinarily close to users and are comfortable observing messy real-world processes rather than relying exclusively on feature requests.\nCan distinguish between an impressive AI capability and a product customers will trust with real work.\nMove quickly, think rigorously, and are energized by a product surface where many of the right answers haven't been discovered yet.\nParticularly Compelling\nWe'd be especially interested if you've:\nBuilt core products at a breakout AI company or an exceptional, high-growth B2B software company.\nDirectly owned agentic systems, LLM applications, AI workflow products, AI-native interfaces, or evaluation systems.\nBuilt products where reliability, accuracy, explainability, or trust had meaningful real-world consequences.\nWorked in logistics, manufacturing, commerce, construction, healthcare, field services, or another operationally complex industry.\nBuilt for users who aren't highly technical and have little patience for software that requires them to change how they work.\nDeveloped products where software interacts with both digital systems and real-world operational processes.\nYou don't need to arrive knowing supply chain.\nYou do need to be the kind of product builder who can become dangerous in a complicated domain very quickly.\nThis Probably Isn't the Role for You If\nMost of your AI experience is adding a chatbot or generative feature to an otherwise traditional SaaS product.\nYou think the objective is to maximize autonomy rather than maximize customer outcomes.\nYou prefer product problems where behavior can be completely specified in advance.\nYou stay primarily at the roadmap/PRD layer and expect engineering or research to make the difficult AI product decisions.\nYour first instinct is to replicate a customer's existing workflow exactly as it exists today.\nWhy BackOps\nAI has become remarkably good at generating information.\nThe next frontier is much harder: AI that can be trusted to do the work.\nIn the physical economy, that means more than producing the right answer. An agent has to understand what's happening, make a decision, interact with real systems, navigate exceptions, communicate with real people, and remain accountable until the problem is actually resolved.\nThat creates an unusually rich product problem.\nYou'll help determine how agents reason about real-world operations, where humans remain in the loop, how quality is measured, how trust is earned, and how AI progresses from assisting an operator to owning an outcome.\nFew product teams get the opportunity to define those interaction models while the category itself is still being invented.\nThat's the opportunity at BackOps.","description_format":"text","description_chars":9671,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":6,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Logistics","Computer Vision"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-12T22:18:26Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":7,"expected_fill_days":37,"reasons":["conf:0","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-13T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/backops-product-manager-ai-agents","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/backops-product-manager-ai-agents.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-13T15:07:25Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":23174,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-14T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":3801726},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3801726"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fbackops-product-manager-ai-agents"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fbackops-product-manager-ai-agents"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fbackops-product-manager-ai-agents"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/backops-product-manager-ai-agents\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fbackops-product-manager-ai-agents"}]}