Director of Product Management - Agentic Platform Enablement Experience (APEX)

Director of Product Management, Agentic Platform Enablement Experience (APEX)

Remote - US

Overview

Pax8 is the global AI and cloud Marketplace for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Pax8 connects service providers and technology companies on a unified platform to discover, buy, sell, deploy and manage technology solutions for SMBs. More than 47,000 IT partners and 800,000 SMBs rely on Pax8 for expertise, automation and real-time insights to stay productive, protected and prepared for the AI economy. Learn more at pax8.com.

Position Summary

Join Pax8 as Director of Product Management for Agentic Platform Enablement Experience (APEX), the most technical product leader on the APEX team and the day-to-day owner of our agentic platform surfaces, including agent SDKs, tool use and orchestration, the internal developer platform and the autonomy and trust experience that makes agentic capability safe to adopt. You’ll be working with leadership and teams to build and deliver a product with capabilities that has no established precedent. Reporting to the VP of Product Management for APEX, you are the second seat in the practice and the one closest to the code.

This is a principal-caliber individual contributor role with people leadership attached: you set product strategy and launch bars for non-deterministic systems yourself, you stay hands-on in product and engineering repos, and you manage, coach and grow a team of product managers doing the same work.

Essential Responsibilities (includes, but is not limited to)

• Own end-to-end product strategy, roadmap, and launch criteria for the APEX platform surfaces (agent SDK, tool use and orchestration, developer platform, autonomy and trust UX) across a 1-6 quarter horizon; contribute to the portfolio strategy above it

• Set and own launch-readiness criteria for non-deterministic systems in partnership with Engineering, Security, Research, and Design; make the ship vs hold call yourself

• Define the autonomy spectrum per capability (human-in-the-loop, AI-assisted, agentic) and the trust and control experience that makes it legible to the people using it

• Identify and mitigate misuse and risk pre-launch; define the monitoring, audit trail, and rollback that ships with every autonomous capability

• Personally build prototypes, scripts, and evaluation harnesses to test product decisions, working inside engineering and product repos and internal SDKs as a peer user

• Be a daily, hands-on user of the platform you own; file precise, implementable bug reports and behavior-change requests

• Instrument adoption, quality, and safety metrics from day one; run experiments and A/B tests to prove impact rather than assert it

• Manage, coach, and develop a team of product managers; own development plans and performance conversations for each PM, and raise the craft bar for technical, data-driven product judgment on agentic systems

• Hire and develop AI-fluent, technically credible product managers; partner with your leader on staffing plans, resourcing needs, and headcount justification

• Translate vision and portfolio strategy into sequenced, actionable roadmaps tied to business OKRs; own domain-level OKRs and report clearly on progress, risk, and trade-offs

• Make build/buy/partner decisions for capabilities within APEX, with explicit ROI reasoning

• Build trusted relationships with peers in Engineering, Design, Data, Security, Marketing, and GTM; secure cross-functional alignment on the APEX strategy and keep it coherent with adjacent domains

• Ensure responsible AI, ethics, compliance, and legal reviews are completed for products in your domain, following company standards

• Represent the platform internally and externally: enablement, developer relations, launch communications, and public launches that build credibility for Pax8 in the agentic space

• Use AI tools and agents in daily work, and model that practice for the team

Skills & Experience

Core Skills & Experience

• At least eight to ten (8 – 10) years of experience in product management or an equivalent role

• At least three (3) years of experience leading product managers, including experience growing a team

• Engineering background required: prior professional experience as a software engineer, or an equivalent track record driving technical product direction; comfortable writing code personally at prototype quality (prototypes, scripts, eval harnesses) without handing it to an engineer first

• Track record delivering product capabilities on a developer-focused platform (APIs, SDKs, CLIs, developer tools), backed by pointable evidence: launch posts, press coverage, changelogs, or documentation you shipped

• Track record of leading multiple products that drive measurable outcomes, and of leading a significant product, platform, automation, or process transformation

• Data-driven by nature: designs and runs experiments, instruments adoption and quality metrics from day one, and can show a record of moving them, not just launching features

• Scrupulous about value for Pax8 and our partners; able to articulate and defend expected ROI

• Excellent communication, organizational, and people skills; can present a clear narrative to senior leadership

• Comfortable with ambiguity; adapts quickly and keeps the team oriented when priorities shift

Agentic Platform Depth

• Deep, firsthand fluency with how frontier models and agentic systems behave - tool use, planning, multi-step execution, and common failure modes - and with the current agentic platform landscape (agent SDKs, computer-use interfaces, orchestration frameworks)

• Able to read model evals and capability reports directly and translate them into launch bars, acceptance criteria, and roadmap decisions

• Sets safety, authority, and escalation boundaries for autonomous capability, and can defend those boundaries to engineering, security, and executive audiences

• Reached via Breadth (coherence across several interdependent, complex product areas) or Depth (sole expert in one hard, fast-moving product problem) - same level, either route

AI Skills & Experience

• Daily experience with tools like Claude, Microsoft Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Atlassian AI, Figma (design collaboration and AI product research), Pendo (AI product analytics and research collaboration) - with a working view of where each fits in the product workflow

• Solid understanding of AI capabilities and limitations, including cost, latency, and quality trade-offs

• Use enterprise-approved AI tools for daily productivity, and redirect the team away from unapproved tools

• Apply data classification and privacy principles when using AI, and hold the team to the same

• Practice responsible AI: recognize bias, fairness, and transparency requirements and build them into acceptance criteria

• Effective prompting and context-setting - clear instructions, context, iterative refinement - and share what works across the team

• Own the responsible AI ethics review for customer-facing AI products within your domain

• Measure AI product outcomes: accuracy, user satisfaction, adoption, and business impact

• Own and apply the company AI standard within your domain: human-in-the-loop, AI-assisted, and agentic decisions are deliberate, documented, and consistently applied

• AI Proficiency Expectation: Expert

Preferred Skills

• Multiple years of professional experience as a software engineer prior to moving into product, beyond the minimum engineering background required above

• Has personally built agentic evaluations (SWE-bench-style suites, LLM-judge rubrics, model-behavior regression harnesses), not just commissioned them

• Direct experience with research and design teams as a daily collaborator, not a periodic stakeholder

• Took a research result or internal prototype into a production product used at scale

• Defined a new product category or UX pattern with no established pr