Principal Product Manager

The product decisions you make will determine whether millions of Americans can access college. You’ll shape the future of studentaid.gov — the system that processes $120 billion in federal aid each year.

You’ll own product strategy and execution for systems that handle:

Over 10M applications in a 6-month window with brutal traffic spikes and unforgiving deadlines

Complex workflows serving students, parents, and financial aid administrators

Policy requirements that change constantly but must be implemented perfectly

Accessibility standards that aren’t optional — mistakes prevent real students from accessing aid

Stakeholder alignment across engineering, design, policy, legal, and multiple federal agencies

This is a hands-on product leadership role — you’ll work directly with users, write specs, make hard trade-off decisions, and unblock teams to ship faster. The specific methodology doesn’t matter — we need product managers who can ship what users actually need. Tasks may include:

Own product roadmap for critical FAFSA features used by millions of families

Turn vague policy requirements into clear specs engineering can execute

Make prioritization decisions that determine what ships and what waits

Conduct user research to understand where families struggle and why

Align stakeholders across engineering, policy, legal, and leadership

Remove blockers preventing teams from shipping

We’re looking for product managers who’ve shipped at scale and led without authority — typically a strong PM at a top tech company or product leader at a high-growth startup, with experience in most of the following:

You won’t have direct reports, but you’ll advocate for users while steering cross-functional, cross-agency teams with engineering, policy, comms, contractor partners, and legal in the mix to solve the hardest problems.

Owned product strategy and shipped features for systems serving millions of users

Led cross-functional teams through ambiguous, complex product problems

Made hard trade-off decisions balancing user needs, business constraints, and technical feasibility

Conducted user research that fundamentally changed what teams built

Written product specs that engineering teams could actually execute

Our interview process is fully remote, consisting of 3-5 conversations that assess work experience, fit, and technical skills.