Forward Deployed Product Manager

Higharc is a VC-backed startup transforming how new homes are designed and built. Founded by a team with product experience at Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Nike, and Apple, we’ve raised over $175M from top venture capital firms and 18+ strategic investors in construction, manufacturing, and distribution.

About the role

We’re seeking a hands-on Forward Deployed Product Manager to turn a large production homebuilder's unstructured plan catalog into structured, queryable product data. This is a founding role on a new Forward Deployed team, working embedded with clients to convert scattered drawing sets into actionable data—enabling searchable libraries, geometric similarity scoring, and structured analysis of plan variation. Higharc is fully remote; you can work anywhere in the continental U.S. with up to 30% travel to client sites and company events.

Responsibilities

• Embed with homebuilder HQ, regional, and division teams to run discovery—locate plan assets, establish source of truth, and document how each division represents its plans and where variation originates.
• Own product definition for the searchable plan library, analytics dashboard, and agent-enabled search—defining what a good query looks like, what a useful answer entails, and what “structured for analysis” means in practice.
• Tune Higharc’s Autotranslate AI to identify, categorize, and translate floorplans into structured data.
• Work hands-on with the data: query the structured plan library directly, build against internal APIs, and ship working capability back to users rather than filing tickets.
• Define acceptance criteria for delivery milestones—coverage targets, data-field completeness, QA error thresholds—and uphold them under schedule pressure.
• Frame and defend quantifiable ROI: redundancy across a catalog, dimensional spread on repeated conditions, consolidation candidates, and the purchasing leverage each represents.
• Partner with Forward Deployed Engineering, Technical Lead, QA, Intake Specialists, and Client Strategy, and present progress and tradeoffs to executive stakeholders.
• Capture playbooks, artifacts, and data patterns to replicate the forward-deployed model across future engagements.

Requirements

• 5+ years of product management experience, including significant time in customer-facing or deployed settings—enterprise implementations, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or professional services.
• Hands-on technical fluency: write SQL, work in notebooks, script against APIs, and interrogate data sets directly rather than requesting pulls.
• Experience prototyping to validate ideas quickly using tools like Cursor, Replit, or V0.dev.
• Track record defining structured data models, taxonomies, or classification schemes and driving business adoption.
• Strong judgment about data quality—understanding what level of accuracy a decision requires and what it costs to achieve.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including with executive stakeholders who have limited time and no patience for status without substance.
• Willingness to travel to client sites and company events up to 30% of the time.

Nice to have

• Background in residential construction, homebuilding, architecture, or AEC technology—especially fluency with plan sets, elevations, options, and how builders manage plan variation.
• Experience with agent-based or natural-language search over structured data, RAG systems, or LLM-powered analytics.
• Exposure to geometric or spatial data—CAD/BIM, computer vision on drawings, similarity and clustering methods.
• Experience with large, messy, enterprise-scale data migrations or ingestion programs.
• Experience building a function from zero: first hire into a new team, practice, or delivery model.

Benefits

• Competitive salary with significant equity in a fast-growing, well-funded company.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Flexible PTO and meaningful maternity/paternity leave.
• Short- and long-term disability plans and a 401K.
• Stipend to create an ideal home office.

Schedule

Higharc is fully remote with flexible hours. Travel to client sites and company events up to 30% of the time.