Company Description
Candidly was founded in 2016 to flip the script on what it means to plan, borrow, repay, and save for college. Today, we’re the category leader with the market’s most comprehensive AI-driven student debt and savings optimization platform. We partner with hundreds of top employers, financial institutions, and retirement record keepers, positioning Candidly to serve more than 35 million Americans.
We’re already achieving incredible results — to date, we’ve helped our users get on track to eliminate more than $1.8B in student debt and pay off their loans 175,000 years quicker — and we’re seeking movers, shakers, innovators, and problem solvers to help take our mission even further.
Candidly is a high-growth, Series B startup, funded by leading investors including Altos Ventures, Aflac, Salesforce Ventures, UBS, Equal Opportunity Ventures, Impact Engine, Rethink Impact, Unum, and Cercano Management. Our fully remote, international team of 70 (and counting) includes alumni from Google, UBS, Twitter, Plaid, Prudential, LendingTree, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and more.
Job Description
We're looking for a Senior Product Manager to own and evolve Cait, Candidly's AI-powered conversational financial wellness assistant. Cait helps users navigate student debt, college planning, and employer benefits through intelligent, personalized guidance. You'll define the product vision, drive the roadmap, and ship features that meaningfully improve financial outcomes for hundreds of thousands of users.
This role requires someone who is AI-enabled—you actively use AI tools (Claude Code, ChatGPT, Cursor, etc.) to accelerate your work, from writing specs to analyzing data to prototyping solutions. We expect you to bring a force-multiplier mindset: leveraging AI to move faster, think deeper, and ship better products.
What You'll Do
Product Strategy & Execution
- Define and own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for Cait across student debt, college planning, and benefits guidance for our enterprise customers
- Partner with engineering, design, and data science to ship enterprise-ready features iteratively
- Write clear briefs, specs, and user stories that align teams and reduce ambiguity
- Lead discovery and research—user interviews, data analysis, competitive landscape—to inform prioritization
AI-First Product Development
- Collaborate with the AI/ML team on agent engineering, tool design, RAG content strategy, and conversational design
- Design conversation flows, guardrails, and fallback logic for an LLM-powered assistant
- Use AI tools daily to accelerate your own workflows—drafting docs, analyzing metrics, synthesizing research, prototyping ideas
- Own the evals process: Define what "good" looks like for Cait's responses—accuracy, tone, compliance, actionability. Build and maintain test sets that catch regressions, measure quality over time, and give the team confidence to ship. You'll work with engineering to integrate evals into CI/CD so we can iterate on prompts and models without breaking things.
Metrics & Iteration
- Define KPIs and build dashboards to measure engagement, conversion, and user outcomes
- Run experiments (A/B tests, feature flags) and drive data-informed iterations
- Conduct funnel analysis and identify opportunities to improve activation, retention, and value delivery
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Work closely with Customer Success, Support, and Compliance to incorporate feedback and ensure quality
- Partner with Sales and Marketing on positioning, demos, and go-to-market for new capabilities
- Communicate roadmap progress, launch results, and learnings across the org
Continuous Improvement
- Prioritize and manage the backlog; lead sprint ceremonies and release coordination
- Test releases, triage bugs, and maintain product quality standards
- Contribute to evolving our product culture, processes, and best practices
What We're Looking For
Experience
- 3-5 years as a Product Manager in B2C or B2B SaaS, with demonstrable experience shipping and iterating on successful AI-based products
- Experience with AI/ML-powered products—conversational AI, LLMs, recommendation systems, or similar
- Background in FinTech, ideally in financial wellness, lending, benefits, or personal finance
- Proven ability to define metrics, run experiments, and use data to drive decisions
Skills & Mindset
- AI-enabled: You actively use AI tools to multiply your productivity and expect the same from your teams. You're curious about what's possible and quick to adopt new capabilities.
- Strong analytical skills—comfortable with SQL, dashboards, and funnel/conversion analysis
- Excellent written and verbal communication; can write a crisp spec or tell a compelling product story
- Pragmatic decision-maker who balances user needs, technical feasibility, and business priorities
- Ownership mentality—you drive outcomes, not just outputs
- Collaborative and low-ego; you build trust across functions
Bonus
- Hands-on experience with AI evals—building test sets, defining rubrics, running automated and human evaluations, using tools like Braintrust, Langsmith, or custom frameworks
- Experience with prompt engineering, agentic, and RAG architectures
- Familiarity with student loans, IDR plans, PSLF, 529s, or employer benefits (SLRM, tuition reimbursement, etc.)
- Experience working directly with enterprise clients or B2B2C models
Why Candidly?
We're building the future of financial wellness—helping people tackle student debt, plan for college, and maximize their benefits. Cait is at the center of that mission: an AI assistant that delivers personalized, actionable guidance at scale. If you want to ship AI products that genuinely improve people's financial lives, this is the role.
Background and EEOC
Candidly offers for employment are conditioned upon satisfactory completion of our employment screening process (including, but not limited to, a review of past employment and education records, background investigation, and/or credit check & fingerprints).
Candidly strives to foster an environment where every employee can succeed. As an Equal Opportunity Employer we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, veteran status, or any other basis covered by applicable law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.
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What We Do
Candidly is an AI-driven student debt and savings optimization platform that addresses the full lifecycle of education expenses and empowers people to make simultaneous progress on paying down student debt and building wealth. Candidly partners with leading employers, financial services companies serving the workplace like 401(k) and 403(b) recordkeepers, financial institutions, retirement plan advisors and more, to embed its experience anywhere a user works, banks, or experiences financial services. The platform supports flexible integration options including outlink, SSO, widget integration, and APIs that meet partners where they really are in resourcing, technical debt, and product resourcing/roadmap capacity. Candidly supports multiple branding options including white labeling and co-branding. Candidly understands that education is one of the largest investments most people will make in a lifetime — whether for themselves or their children. Candidly brings compassion, authenticity, and confidence to Americans as they navigate their higher education pursuits — past, present and future. Candidly is backed by leading venture capital and strategic investors including Aflac, Equal Opportunity Ventures, Impact Engine, Rethink Impact, Salesforce Ventures, UBS, Unum, and Vulcan Capital. For more information, visit www.getcandidly.com
