Founding Product Manager (Applied AI) - Thorin

Reposted 16 Days Ago
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San Francisco, CA, USA
In-Office
Senior level
Angel or VC Firm • Software
The Role
The Founding Product Manager will define the product vision and roadmap for an AI startup, collaborating closely with engineers and enterprise leaders to shape the platform and ensure its effectiveness in automating business workflows.
Summary Generated by Built In

Title: Founding Product Manager

Location: San Francisco

Company: Thorin

Stage: Seed | Incubated at 8VC

About Thorin

Thorin is an applied AI company born out of 8VC’s Build program, focused on redefining how work gets done inside modern organizations. We build proactive, long-horizon AI agents that continuously observe work across Slack, email, meetings, and documents—and take action so nothing falls through the cracks.

Unlike traditional AI tools that wait for prompts or rely on structured systems, Thorin creates a real-time digital twin of how a business actually operates, enabling automation, coordination, and insight over months and years. Backed by 8VC and built with product vision from Joe Lonsdale, Thorin is building foundational infrastructure for agentic, AI-powered productivity.


With backing and product vision from Joe Lonsdale, Thorin is 8VC’s latest incubation, following the success of Affinity, Addepar, Saronic, and other unicorns.

About the Role

We’re hiring a Founding Product Manager to help define Thorin’s product from first principles. This is a core founding role, sitting at the intersection of AI systems, enterprise infrastructure, and real-world business operations.

You will own product direction end-to-end: shaping Thorin’s primitives, deciding what the system should understand and automate, and ensuring that powerful agentic capabilities are exposed through products that enterprise leaders can trust, adopt, and scale.

This role is not only about backlog management. It’s about deciding what Thorin should become.

What You’ll Do

  • Own Thorin’s product vision and roadmap across visibility, process modeling, guardrails, and agentic execution

  • Define the core abstractions of the Thorin platform — what a “process,” “policy,” “metric,” and “agent” mean in a living enterprise system

  • Partner deeply with AI Engineers to shape agent behavior, evaluation frameworks, reliability thresholds, and iteration loops

  • Work hand-in-hand with Infrastructure leadership to ensure product decisions meet enterprise-grade security, compliance, and scalability requirements

  • Collaborate with Product Engineers to design and ship intuitive user experiences on top of complex AI systems

  • Lead customer discovery with design partners and early enterprise adopters, translating messy operational reality into clear product direction

What You Bring

  • 5+ years of experience building and owning complex software products, ideally in enterprise, platform, or infrastructure-adjacent domains

  • Proven ability to operate as a founding or early-stage PM, defining product direction in the absence of precedent

  • Strong technical fluency — you can reason about AI systems, distributed infrastructure, and product tradeoffs without needing abstraction layers.

  • CS degree strongly preferred

  • Experience working closely with engineers on systems where reliability, trust, and correctness matter

  • Exceptional product judgment — you can turn ambiguous, high-stakes problems into crisp product decisions

  • Comfort with uncomfortable ambiguity — you enjoy operating without playbooks

  • Clear, structured project management and communication skills — you can align engineers, customers, and leadership around a shared product vision

Bonus:

  • Experience with AI-native, agentic, or automation-heavy products

  • Familiarity with enterprise workflows

  • Background in process modeling, operational analytics, or enterprise systems of record

  • Prior experience selling or deploying products into large enterprises

About the Team & Why Thorin

  • Work closely with a small, highly driven founding team, design partners, and directly with Joe Lonsdale, who remains deeply involved in product vision, strategy, and hiring

  • Operate with high agency, rapid iteration, and direct customer exposure from day one

  • Help define how a category-defining AI company goes to market from first principles

  • Build with the backing of one of the strongest early-stage venture platforms in the industry

Skills Required

  • 5+ years of experience building and owning complex software products
  • Strong technical fluency regarding AI systems and distributed infrastructure
  • Experience working with engineers on reliable systems
  • Exceptional product judgment in high-stakes scenarios
  • Clear project management and communication skills

8vc Compensation & Benefits Highlights

The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about 8vc and has not been reviewed or approved by 8vc.

  • Fair & Transparent Compensation Pay is considered competitive for a small, high‑intensity VC firm, with sentiment characterizing compensation as generally above average. Overall impressions point to a cautiously positive view of total pay despite variability by role.
  • Equity Value & Accessibility Investment and firm‑building roles can include discretionary bonus and, in some cases, carry or other long‑term upside. This potential for long‑dated economics enhances total rewards for select titles.
  • Leave & Time Off Breadth Time‑off policies are portrayed as flexible, with references to “unlimited” PTO and remote flexibility in secondary listings. Such flexibility is commonly positioned as part of the overall package, pending confirmation of actual norms.

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The Company
HQ: Austin, Texas
208 Employees

What We Do

8VC is a venture capital fund based in Austin, Texas. For more information, please visit www.8VC.com

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