Product Manager, Real Time

Why this role matters

Customer intent is clearest in the moment they're interacting, and the window to act on it is short. Hitting that window is one of the hardest infrastructure problems in the data stack. You have to capture behavior the instant it happens, evaluate it against everything already known about the person, and return an answer in a few milliseconds. It's what powers the personalization that actually works: a storefront that reranks while you're still searching, an ad that stops following you once you've bought, or an AI conversation that already knows what you're trying to do. On stale data, the same experiences are generic at best and wrong at worst.

Until now, real-time experiences have been either functionally limited or only available to the most sophisticated companies through in-house tech. We're bringing real-time personalization to every brand, built on their own data, with their full history and nearly any logic they want to run. The Real-Time suite already powers experiences for some of the biggest brands and most-trafficked sites in the world, and since these capabilities are so new, the best use cases are still being invented. You'll decide where it goes from here.

What you'll own

You'll own our real-time products within Customer Data Infrastructure. This team is focused on capturing user behavior as it happens and enabling our customers to act on it in the moment. You'll be driving product decisions across an early but maturing, technically demanding suite that already powers some of our largest enterprise deployments:

1. Events: the event collection pipeline, SDKs, and tooling to get live customer data flowing reliably at scale.
2. Real-Time Evaluation: the systems to power sub-second computation of user traits and audience membership, layering event stream data on top of historical warehouse data for a complete, unlimited real-time CDP.
3. Personalization API: the low-latency APIs that serve unified customer data to live experiences in milliseconds.

What you'll do

You'll drive roadmap and execution across the Real-Time suite: building specs and turning them into shipped product, partnering closely with engineering on architecture and scaling decisions, and representing the suite in front of some of the world's largest brands. You'll own the competitive research and customer evidence for the area, and shape the strategy and positioning for real-time across Hightouch.

At Hightouch, you'll be joining a world-class Product team that doesn't just talk about innovation. We live and breathe it. We're the team that invented Reverse ETL and pioneered the Composable architecture, fundamentally transforming the CDP landscape, and as we've evolved into a multi-product powerhouse, we've maintained a lean, high-impact Product team where each PM is a true owner, independently driving their product area to deliver direct business impact.

What we're looking for

• Technical depth. You can hold your own with engineers on systems design, architecture, and scaling tradeoffs, and turn those discussions into clear product decisions. You've shipped real product in a technical domain (data platforms, events, distributed systems, identity, or cross-product platforms).
• Customer obsession. You get close enough to customers to separate what they really need from what they ask for, and you have the conviction to build for the need, even in front of large enterprise customers and in live deals.
• Outcome mindset. You judge your work by the result it drove, not the amount you shipped.
• Clear communication. You write clearly and have an ability to synthesize many moving parts into something engineers, customers, and execs can all act on.
• Fast ramp. You've shown a history of picking up new concepts and new domains quickly and getting to real depth, and you lean into AI when you need to learn and ramp even faster.

Interview process

• Recruiter Screen [30m]: Intro call to get to know each other and check for mutual fit.
• Hiring Manager Interview [30m]: A conversation about past experience and how you operate.
• Technical Design Interview [90m]: Given a complex real-time customer requirement, you'll work through how you'd design the system and the product around it.
• Case Study Interview [90m]: A two-part problem-solving session.
• GTM Interview [30m]: How you partner with go-to-market counterparts and support pipeline.

We are looking for talented, intellectually curious, and motivated individuals who are interested in tackling the problems above. This is a senior role, but we focus on impact and potential for growth more than years of experience. The salary range for this position is $240,000 - $320,000 USD per year, which is location independent in accordance with our remote-first policy. We also offer meaningful equity compensation.