SVP, Product

From the listing

About the role

What you'll do

• Own Toptal’s AI product strategy across the marketplace, talent and client experiences, internal systems, and products taken to market, along with the business outcomes they carry.
• Decide what to build with AI and what not to, including build-versus-buy on models and tooling and the packaging and pricing of AI-enabled products.
• Make AI quality measurable through evals, acceptance bars, and review loops, and partner with Engineering on the platform as its most demanding customer.
• Rebuild how Product works using AI-assisted discovery, research, prototyping, and analysis, raising the output and judgment of every product manager.
• Work directly with AI researchers; write your own specs, pull your own data, and build rough versions of agents to test whether they hold up before budgeting for them.
• Own the vision, strategy, and multi-year roadmap for the whole portfolio: what to build, what to sunset, and how investment is distributed across growth, platform, and operational leverage.
• Establish the product operating model and its metrics so decisions are made on evidence and user research rather than opinion.
• Own the product integration of acquisitions and new products, and act as a senior voice of the customer for both talent and clients.
• Define what a product team should look like as product manager, engineer, and designer roles blur.
• Own scoping, team sizing, headcount planning, and the role and hiring bar for every seat; hit time-sensitive hiring commitments.
• Review product work directly, develop people against a clear bar, and raise it as the organization grows.
• In the first week, learn the organization’s operational frameworks, platform architecture, marketplace dynamics, internal tooling, and current AI initiatives; begin building relationships with the CEO, executive team, and direct reports.

What they're looking for

• Bachelor’s degree is required.
• At least 15 years of proven software Product Management experience.
• At least 8 years of experience leading Product organizations, including leading other product leaders (managing managers).
• Proven ability to raise the level of a product organization through the people you hire and develop.
• Proven ownership of resourcing and workforce planning, with a quantifiable hiring track record and experience making hard calls when someone was not clearing the bar.
• Experience owning an entire product portfolio at a high-growth technology company, with accountability for business outcomes and not solely delivery.
• Demonstrated success setting product strategy at the executive level and translating it into an executable roadmap across multiple teams and domains.
• Experience leading AI-enabled products, with a focus on delivering measurable business outcomes.
• Deep, hands-on command of agentic architectures, harness and orchestration design, retrieval, context engineering, fine-tuning, evaluation, and the economics of running models in production. You have shipped these yourself.
• Further ahead on AI than the executives around you, able to teach it, and proven at moving an organization to adopt something it was not asking for.
• Growth marketing fluency, understanding acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention well enough to build for them.
• Comfortable working with SQL or spreadsheets to analyze data and conducting research with internal and external users.

Nice to have

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical discipline (Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems).
• Masters is strongly preferred.
• Experience with marketplace, platform, or two-sided business models is a strong plus.
• Prior experience working as a Software Engineer is a strong plus.

Benefits, as listed