Principal Product Manager, Customs & Border Authorities

Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing.

About the role

The rules of global trade are being rewritten in real time. Supply chain transparency requirements, forced labor enforcement, fentanyl and precursor interdiction, tariff volatility, revenue leakage, and the pressure to facilitate ever-growing trade volumes with flat resources — customs and border authorities around the world are being asked to do something they’ve never been equipped to do: understand, monitor, and act on the full depth of global commerce, not just the edge of it.

Altana exists to close the gap between what authorities need to know and what they can actually see. As Principal Product Manager for Customs & Border Authorities, you will lead the team defining how customs, border, and revenue agencies harness the power of the Altana network to build safer, more efficient, and more collaborative trade workflows. You will own the product vision across Altana’s core customs offerings: the Altana Passport Manager, the Altana Entry Processing System, and the Altana Trade Enforcement Suite.

Responsibilities

• Own the product vision for how Altana is deployed to customs, border, and revenue authorities — meeting each agency where it is across varied geographies, legal regimes, sovereignty requirements, and levels of digital maturity.
• Unify our platform and architecture so a single core capability set can serve many governments while honoring each authority’s sovereign control over its own data and business logic.
• Shape how authorities collaborate — within an agency, across agencies, and with trusted trading partners abroad — to build safer, more efficient, and more collaborative trade workflows.
• Partner closely with Altana’s enterprise product areas so that what traders submit and what authorities receive tells one coherent, trusted story.
• Own the product vision for the Altana Passport Manager, which lets border authorities review product passports and apply their own sovereign business logic to pre-clear goods before they ever reach the border.
• Move authorities beyond paper-based trusted-trader programs toward real-time, data-driven pre-clearance that scales with global trade volumes.
• Build the tooling that lets each authority encode, test, and govern its own rules and risk logic on top of Altana’s network intelligence — without writing code and without ceding control of its data.
• Own the Altana Entry Processing System, which integrates with and augments an agency’s existing targeting systems to deliver AI-driven entry review on streaming entries.
• Own the integration layer: high-volume REST APIs, EDI pipelines, and configurable connections to customs management and targeting systems that make Altana feel like a native capability, not another integration project.
• Ensure the system augments rather than rips out — earning trust by improving the targeting and workflows agencies already depend on.
• Own the Altana Trade Enforcement Suite, giving customs, border, and revenue agencies the ability to screen for enforcement and revenue threats, including:
  • Enforcement: counternarcotics, forced labor, trade-based money laundering, and trade diversion.
  • Revenue: undervaluation, illegal transshipment and country-of-origin (COO) laundering, and HS misclassification.
• Move agencies beyond simple rule-matching to AI-driven, network-aware targeting — surfacing shell companies, obfuscated ownership, and anomalous trade routes that indicate evasion, illicit trade, or sanctions circumvention.
• Deliver a suite of customizable targeting models that each border authority can tailor to its own priorities, threat picture, and legal authorities.
• Design the investigator-facing workflows officers use to review high-risk shipments, gather evidence, collaborate across teams and agencies, and build cases that hold up.
• Set the product strategy and roadmap across pre-clearance, entry processing, and enforcement — balancing near-term agency impact against the long-term platform bets that matter most.
• Partner closely with engineering, design, data science, and government affairs and our private sector product and engineering teams to translate policy mandates and operational realities into product capabilities that work at the scale and latency border agencies require.
• Build a culture of “show, don’t tell” — a team that defines system interfaces, drafts API specs, and prototypes workflows before production code is written, and that ships things that work in the real world.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience at the intersection of trade, customs enforcement, or border security technology — understanding the operational constraints, the data limitations, and the political realities from the inside.
• You know the difference between a manifest and an entry summary and have seen how targeting and clearance decisions get made.
• You think in networks, not transactions, and understand that trade is inherently a network system.
• You’re energized by graph-based analytics, AI-driven pattern detection, and the opportunity to give border officers a view of global commerce that’s never existed before.
• You can hold policy and product in your head at the same time and have translated high-level mandates into concrete product features.
• You know how to write a requirement an engineer can build, and how to explain a data architecture to a customs official who has never written a line of code.
• You build for many authorities, not one, and are comfortable designing for agencies across developed and emerging economies.
• You lead teams that build, not just describe — defining system interfaces, drafting API specs, and prototyping workflows before production code is written.
• You’re tech-enabled and obsessed with UX, understanding the plumbing (APIs, EDI, ETL/ELT, JSON) but equally focused on user experience.
• Eligibility for a U.S. security clearance, or an existing clearance / CBP background investigation, is a strong plus.

Preferred Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in customs enforcement, border security technology, trade compliance, or trade facilitation.
• 7+ years of product management experience, ideally spanning complex enterprise or government systems.
• Direct experience with customs agency operations, trusted-trader/pre-clearance programs, or trade facilitation modernization initiatives — in the U.S. or internationally.
• Familiarity with targeting systems, risk scoring, and enforcement workflow design in a customs, border, or law enforcement context.
• Working knowledge of trade data structures: entry summaries, manifests, advance ship notices, HS/HTS classification, and country-of-origin determinations.
• Experience with revenue protection (undervaluation, transshipment/COO laundering, HS misclassification) and/or enforcement missions (counternarcotics, forced labor, TBML, trade diversion).
• Experience delivering products across multiple countries or agencies, including emerging-market contexts.
• Prior experience with API-based integrations, data pipeline architecture, or enterprise system implementation.

Values

• Trust: Our customers and partners entrust us with missions of the highest importance. We honor that by keeping our word, meeting commitments, and ensuring every action we take reinforces confidence in us.
• Resilience: In a world of uncertainty and complexity, our work must withstand challenges, evolve with conditions, and ensure reliability over time. Resilience is both how we operate and what we deliver.
• Stewardship: We are stewards of every mission we touch. Our responsibility extends beyond individual projects to the broader system of global trade. We believe that stewardship starts from within so that we can bring focus, creativity, and excellence to our work.