[Hiring] Senior Product Manager @Universal Audio

Role Description

We are hiring for a Senior Product Manager. This is a dual-mandate role, and both halves are equally weighted. Roughly half your time is spent as the Product Owner of a dedicated Agile software team — you own its backlog, write its specifications, and are accountable for what it ships and when. The other half is spent as the Senior Product Manager for a line of professional audio interface hardware — you own the roadmap, the business case, and the launch.

These are not two jobs bolted together. The software team you run exists largely to support the hardware you define, so the person in this seat is the single point where hardware requirements become software commitments with real dates attached. We are looking for someone who is as comfortable ranking a sprint backlog and reproducing a driver bug on a nightly build as they are presenting a BOM cost trade-off to leadership.

We are open to candidates in the United States. Candidates located in commutable distance to our HQ, Scotts Valley, CA are a plus.

Responsibilities

• Product Owner for an Agile software team (~50%)
• Backlog and sprint ownership
  • You are the single accountable owner of one scrum team's backlog: you rank it, keep it groomed, and decide what enters a sprint.
  • Run the product side of two-week sprints — planning, mid-sprint review, refinement, demo.
  • Partner with the Scrum Master and Engineering Manager on capacity and sprint goals.
• Specifications and acceptance criteria
  • Translate hardware and business requirements into written software specifications detailed enough for an engineer to build from and QA to test against.
  • Every spec goes to the software architect and QA leads before development starts, and every story has agreed-upon acceptance criteria.
• Software delivery schedules tied to hardware milestones
  • Work with the Project Manager to determine what part of the software stack must deliver which functionality and by when.
  • Publish and defend feature-complete, beta, release-candidate, and release-to-marketing dates.
• Bug triage and release management
  • Own defect priority: write reproducible bug reports yourself, decide what blocks a beta or release.
  • Own the release plan and its artifacts — release notes, known-issues lists, compatibility test matrices, and documentation handoffs.
• Prioritization and instrumentation
  • Maintain an explicit, defensible method (e.g. WSJF) for weighing stability, performance, tech debt, and customer-care-driven fixes against new feature work.
  • Define the analytics events and reporting needed to know whether a feature is actually being adopted.
• Senior Product Manager, audio interface hardware (~50%)
• Product requirements
  • Author complete requirement sets spanning hardware, mechanical, electrical and audio specification, connectivity, driver support, software behavior, packaging, and documentation.
• Supply, lifecycle, and vendor management
  • Track component lifecycle and last-time-buy exposure, drive cost-down opportunities, and plan transitions.
  • Manage the product relationship with silicon and driver vendors, technology partners, and contract manufacturers.
• Customer discovery and go-to-market
  • Run research with working professionals and enthusiasts, and own the activation and onboarding funnel.
  • Partner with commercial, marketing, sales, and operations on SKU structure, pricing, bundling, launch readiness, channel and inventory planning, and EOL execution.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated Product Owner experience on a scrum team.
• Technical fluency sufficient to hold your own with systems engineers.
• Hands-on by instinct — you install the nightly build, reproduce the bug, read the installer log, and run the test pass yourself when it matters.
• Excellent written communication.
• Power-user command of Jira and Confluence (or close equivalents).
• Proven ability to make decisions and hold a schedule in ambiguous, multi-stakeholder situations.
• Fluency in music production and audio recording.
• Willingness to travel occasionally, including to trade shows and manufacturing partners.

Preferred

• Experience with a major platform or driver architecture migration.
• Analytics instrumentation experience.
• Experience working with overseas contract manufacturers through DVT and mass production.
• Go-to-market, retail, or e-commerce experience.

Education and Experience

• 5+ years of product management experience shipping consumer or professional hardware and the software that drives it.
• Bachelor’s Degree (or equivalent experience).

Salary Range

UA Salary Range of Pay: $145,000 - $155,000

Base salary pay will be based on the cost of labor for the city/state in which the new hire resides, at the time of hire.

Benefits

• Profit sharing
• Medical/Dental/Vision
• 401K Safe Harbor Contribution
• Stock Options
• Flexible time-off (PTO/Sick Leave/Company Holiday Time-off)