PlayOn Sports is the leading platform for high school sports media, streaming live games to millions of fans and powering the next generation of prep sports experiences. We partner with schools, state associations, and athletic programs across the country to bring every play to every fan, wherever they are.
PlayOn is investing heavily in its computer vision and artificial intelligence pipeline, which transforms raw game footage into highlights, text recaps and statistics. This work sits at the intersection of live video, machine learning, and high school sports fandom, and it has the potential to fundamentally change what it means to watch a prep sports game online.
We're looking for a Principal Product Manager to take end-to-end ownership of a new product line focused on these capabilities, from strategy all the way to launch and including the operating rhythm that keeps it healthy at scale. This is a product leadership role focused on the most dynamic area in technology today. You'll set the vision, make the hard tradeoffs, and drive outcomes across engineering, data, design, and our external partners.
This role is for you if you thrive in ambiguous, high-impact environments, have a track record of turning early-stage bets into shipped products, and are energized by the idea of making high school sports moments more discoverable and meaningful.
This is an individual contributor role initially, with the expectation to grow a small team as the product line matures.
The Outcomes You Will Deliver
- A production-grade AI content pipeline, live across multiple sports.
- A sport-agnostic game data model that is PlayOn's canonical source of game intelligence.
- An operating model that runs without you in the critical path.
What You Will Own
- Set and own the multi-year vision for the product line, aligning business leadership, engineering, partners and vendors on scope, sequencing, and success metrics.
- Translate business goals including fan engagement and growth, content quality and coverage, and school retention and growth, into a concrete product strategy spanning computer vision capabilities, data pipelines, and fan-facing surfaces.
- Define and drive product line KPIs: accuracy benchmarks, processing latency, content coverage, and downstream product adoption.
Partner & Vendor Leadership
- Own the strategic relationship with our computer vision and AI vendors. Set the agenda, work to align roadmaps, and hold partners to their delivery commitments.
- Evaluate new CV capabilities including object detection, OCR, region-of-interest framing, tracking and automated highlight segmentation, and make the call on what to integrate, when, and why.
- Drive integrations forward with vendor engineering teams, unblocking hard problems and accelerating capability adoption.
Cross-Functional Leadership
- Partner with Data Engineering to build a sport-agnostic game data model that works across sports, game formats, broadcast configurations and game data sources.
- Influence cross-product roadmaps to ensure fan and school-facing surfaces keep pace with our AI pipeline and create critical feedback loops that inform modeling priorities.
- Give Operations and Support teams the visibility and tooling they need to triage and resolve content delivery issues without engineering escalation.
Operational Ownership
- Build the operating model for the product line, including sport-specific configurations, fallback handling and quality review workflows, and evolve it as the product scales.
- Close the loop between output quality (human review, fan signals, partner feedback) and upstream model or configuration improvements.
- Own health end-to-end. Surface risks early, resolve dependencies, and create transparency around content delivery, timing, quality and coverage.
What You'll Bring
Required
- 8+ years in product management, technical product management, or a leadership role driving complex cross-team initiatives end to end.
- A track record of leading an important company initiative - one where you were the person accountable for the outcome, working across multiple engineering teams, external partners, and business stakeholders.
- Working fluency with AI/ML concepts. You understand what modern ML systems can and can't do, you can reason about model quality tradeoffs, and you can hold your own in technical discussions with ML engineers and vendors. You don’t need to have led an AI product before; you do need to be ready to lead one now.
- Strong data fluency. Comfortable reading and writing SQL, interpreting quality metrics, and reasoning about schema design and pipeline tradeoffs.
- Experience owning external partner relationships at a strategic level, shaping integration contracts, holding partners accountable, and escalating effectively.
- Excellent communication. Crisp product writing, clear executive presence, and the ability to build alignment across technical and non-technical audiences.
- High tolerance for ambiguity; a proven instinct for creating structure and momentum in early-stage problem spaces.
Preferred
- Experience with live video streaming infrastructure or media processing pipelines (encoding, segmentation, metadata extraction).
- Familiarity with computer vision capabilities relevant to sports (object tracking, OCR, scene segmentation, highlight detection).
- Background in sports media, sports data, or adjacent domains (prep sports, broadcast, sports tech).
- Exposure to modern data stacks (Snowflake, dbt, Hightouch) and event-driven data architectures.
- Experience working with external sports data platforms (MaxPreps, NCAA data feeds, or similar) as data sources or integration targets.
- Real ownership from day one. This is a greenfield product line in one of PlayOn’s highest-priority investment areas. You’ll shape the strategy, run the execution, and own the outcome.
- Broad scope. You’ll operate critical aspects of our business, across product, partnerships, data and operations. It’s the kind of exposure and scope that builds the next generation of PlayOn leaders.
- Real-world scale. PlayOn streams tens of thousands of live high school games annually. Your work will generate millions of real moments for real fans.
- Mission that matters. High school sports matter to communities. The athletes you’re building for don’t have broadcast deals or highlight reels - yet. You’ll change that.
Ownership over Participation- You take responsibility for achieving holistic outcomes, prioritize key objectives, and adapt quickly when situations require a different approach. You follow through even against the toughest challenges.
Team over Stars- You are a bridge builder, establishing processes and relationships with teams outside your own. You work to rally around common goals, find win-win solutions, compromise when necessary, and help others succeed.
Growth over Comfort- You are driven by a desire to grow and actively seek opportunities to expand your comfort zone, skills, and confidence. You embrace new challenges with curiosity, accepting discomfort and failure as opportunities to learn.
Fairness over Popularity- You approach decisions with a scientist’s mindset, challenging your assumptions and remaining objective. You consider long-term impact rather than relying on short-term gains, proactively seek others’ perspectives, and manage emotions in decision-making.
PlayOn is where high school sports come to life. Through GoFan, NFHS Network, and MaxPreps, we give every fan a front-row seat to the moments that matter most: the buzzer-beaters, the comeback wins, the senior nights, the rivalries that define a town.
We built our technology for the people who live and breathe high school athletics — the parents who never miss a game, the alumni still cheering from across the country, the communities that show up week after week. From buying tickets to watching a live stream to reliving the highlights, we make it simple to stay close to the sports and the athletes you love most.
Backed by KKR, we build the technology that powers high school athletics from the inside out: Schools trust us to handle ticketing, streaming, fundraising, concessions, merchandise, and more so the people running programs can stay focused on the athletes and fans we all serve together.
We're a growth-stage company on a mission to make high school sports more accessible, more memorable, and more connected than ever before.
When being there means everything, we make sure you never miss a moment.
Why You'll Love Working at PlayOn
Skills Required
- 8+ years in product management or related leadership roles
- Proven track record of delivering complex projects across multiple teams
- Fluency in AI and ML concepts
- Strong data analysis skills, including SQL proficiency
- Experience managing external partnerships and integration contracts
- Excellent communication skills for technical and non-technical audiences
PlayOn Sports Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about PlayOn Sports and has not been reviewed or approved by PlayOn Sports.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Open/unlimited PTO, paid holidays, and sick time are prominently offered. Feedback suggests the PTO experience and time-away flexibility are strong.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) with company match is a standard part of the package. Feedback suggests the retirement program is viewed positively.
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Healthcare Strength — Multiple medical plan options plus dental, vision, life, disability, and mental health support are included. Feedback suggests core health coverage is solid for full‑time employees.
PlayOn Sports Insights
What We Do
PlayOn is the all-in-one fan engagement platform for schools. Backed by KKR, our family of brands—including GoFan, NFHS Network, and MaxPreps—empowers schools with innovative solutions and exceptional service. We save administrators time so they can focus on what truly matters: supporting the students, staff, and fans who bring their programs to life. Trusted by thousands of schools across the country, we're here to help create more instant replays, hold-your-breath moments, last-minute comebacks, and games you want to watch over and over again.
Why Work With Us
Product, potential, and people. We’re a leader in the high school event space, constantly evolving our product to meet the needs of administrators. We focus on solving real challenges, learning quickly, and creating impactful solutions. This is a growth-stage company, meaning your contributions have real impact.
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