AI Associate Product Manager - Irvine - FreightPOP

Description

The Company / About us

FreightPOP is a leading provider of AI supply chain software. As a fast-growing, venture-funded startup, we believe growth creates opportunities for everyone on our team and that accelerated experience + adaptive learning = career success. Our shipping and logistics software is easy to use, highly configurable, offers Expedia-like rate shopping, and connects seamlessly to other software to provide a real-time, integrated & connected transportation management solution. FreightPOP is uniquely positioned for hyper-growth in one of the largest and fastest-growing global markets.

FreightPOP is an equal opportunity employer seeking only the most driven entrepreneurial-minded individuals to join our journey. We are a purpose-driven company that fosters a culture of innovation, continuous improvement, collaboration, and accountability. At FreightPOP, you'll be a critical member of our team that operates on the principles of autonomy and accountability.

FreightPOP's Core Values:

· Stay Grounded. Balance the 5 Fs–Faith, Family, Finance (work), Fitness, Fun.

· Dream Big. Shoot for the stars in every endeavor.

· Light it up. Strive to be a source of light for those around us.

· Give Back. Make a difference in our communities.

· Go the Extra Mile. There's no traffic jam on it.

Perks and benefits

We encourage our team to have a positive work/home life balance. We know how to make our work environment enjoyable and rewarding. Here are some of the perks our team enjoys.

• 401k – Available to all employees.
• Hybrid Work – Hybrid option available.
• Accrued PTO – PTO policy includes sick, and vacation paid time off.
• Hopes & Dreams – Employees are invited to meet regularly with a senior leader, one-on-one to map out a path to their personal goals and dreams while at FreightPOP. Hopes & Dreams are not necessarily related to FreightPOP but more importantly, to their personal hopes and dreams.
• Monthly lunch meetings– We hold lunch meetings with the CEO to communicate what was accomplished, recognize employees, company milestones, strategy, organizational changes, and to give employees an open forum to ask questions to our CEO and leadership team.
• Give Back Days - Community service takes the focus off you and puts it on others. From that grounded perspective comes passion, passion for helping others. We created a culture that is passionate about serving others.
• Career Development Program- HR and Executives team up and work with an employee for their career development. The program involves understanding what knowledge, skills, personal characteristics, and experience are required for an employee to progress in their career or through access to promotions and /or departmental transfers or external job searches.
• Tuition Assistance – We understand the value of a good education and take pride in investing in our employees' professional & personal development.
• Employee Shadow Program- Employees are given the opportunity to shadow another employee or outside mentor for professional and personal development opportunities. In addition, new employees get assigned a buddy, someone in a similar role but has been in it for a bit, who will help them get acquainted with the company, expectations, and be a go-to person for questions.
• Stay Interviews- Bi-Annual interviews with current employees to check in and see how they are doing. Take them to lunch and ask what, if anything, would make them leave FreightPOP. This makes our employees feel heard and gives us insight into any issues the executive team might not be aware of.
• Health Insurance & Wellness – More than just health insurance, the Wellness program provides employees with resources to improve employee health and well-being.
• Recognition & Reward – Employees are recognized & rewarded by leadership and co-workers for their hard work and dedication. Based on merit, not tenure.

Job Purpose Summary

The AI Associate Product Manager plays a key role in defining, building, and launching AI-powered features across the FreightPOP platform.

This role blends traditional product management with applied AI strategy. You will help identify high-impact AI opportunities, define intelligent workflows, collaborate with engineering and data teams, and ensure AI capabilities translate into measurable customer value.

You will work across the full product lifecycle from opportunity discovery and model-backed feature definition to testing, deployment, adoption, and optimization.

This is not a research role. It is a product-building role focused on practical AI applications that improve decision-making, automation, and user experience within a transportation management system.

Essential Job Duties/Requirements

• Identify and prioritize AI opportunities aligned with FreightPOP's strategic roadmap.
• Contribute to a long-term AI product vision while managing near-term deliverables.
• Develop subject matter expertise in the product and industry over time.
• Maintain a long-term product vision while guiding day-to-day efforts to achieve business objectives.
• Define success metrics for AI-driven capabilities including adoption, accuracy, and business impact.
• Partner with other product team members and scrum teams to deliver high-quality products on time and within scope.
• Support AI product launches through pilot programs, early customer adoption, and cross-functional enablement with sales and operations teams.
• Promote consistency and quality in product requirements and design by establishing and advocating for product management best practices.
• Collaborate with internal stakeholders, customers, and third-party vendors to define and validate business requirements.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to explore and implement AI tools and frameworks across the product lifecycle from prototyping and testing to deployment and optimization.

Job Qualifications

• Experience designing and shipping LLM-powered features in production environments
• Experience working with AI tools during product development (e.g., for prototyping, user behavior analysis, content generation, or testing).
• Ability to design evaluation frameworks for LLM systems, including:
• Structured evals and benchmarks
• Prompt iteration and testing
• Hallucination detection and quality scoring
• Human-in-the-loop validation
• Experience implementing guardrails and reliability controls, including:
• Prompt constraints and system design safeguards
• Input/output validation
• Monitoring and fallback strategies
• Risk mitigation for hallucinations or unsafe outputs
• Ability to design agent architectures including:
• Tool calling and external system integrations
• Multi-step reasoning and decision flows
• Loop-based task execution
• State and memory management
• Context window optimization
• Understanding of agent orchestration patterns, including single-agent vs multi-agent systems
• Ability to define appropriate boundaries between deterministic workflows and agent-driven decision making
• Experience integrating agents into real product environments with API layers, permissions, logging, and monitoring
• Deep understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs), including strengths, limitations, latency, cost, and failure modes
• Ability to evaluate and select models (hosted APIs vs open-source vs fine-tuned) based on use case, performance, cost, and scalability
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience
• Preferred 1–3 years of experience in product management, product ownership, or business analysis in SaaS
• Experience working on API-driven or integration-heavy products
• Proven track record of defining and delivering successful products.
• Preferred 1+ years of experience in a job in the shipping and logistics software market is preferred
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Technical background, with experience in SaaS cloud based solutions
• Excellent teamwork skills
• Proven ability to influence cross-functional teams without formal authority
• Examples of past successful product launches and outcomes are highly desirable.

Specialized Knowledge & Skills

• Accuracy and Attention to Detail
• Professional demeanor
• Work effectively in a team setting
• Work efficiently across distributed teams
• Aptitude for learning new technologies and concepts
• Proficient time management abilities
• Manage multiple activities in parallel
• Vector databases and embeddings
• Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
• Strong oral and written communication skills
• Excellent organizational skills
• Ability to work independently
• Ability to read and understand API documentation
• Identify and resolve workflow inefficiencies
• Communicate technical information to customer, vendor and various organizational units
• Adapt to Agile Testing practices
• In-depth knowledge of software testing principles, methodologies, automated testing
• Proficiency with programming languages such as JavaScript, Python, SQL, C#, Java, .NET
• Ability to facilitate root cause analysis for critical defects and/or system outages
• Ability to handle multiple priorities and projects at once