Senior Product Manager, Platform AI Initiatives

Civitas Learning is looking for a Senior Product Manager to drive the expansion of Compass AI into the next generation of AI-powered tooling, autonomous agents, and adaptive workflows.

This is a high-visibility, high-impact role focused on execution. Working in close partnership with the VP of Product, you will take a clear AI strategy and bring it to life: running discovery, building with engineering and data science, validating with customers, and shipping capabilities that measurably improve student outcomes at scale.

We are looking for someone who gets genuinely energized by figuring things out. Higher ed institutions are complex environments, and the people we serve (advisors, enrollment teams, financial aid staff) work in ways that are not always obvious from the outside. You do not need to know all of it on day one. You need to want to learn it, find the real problems, and identify where Compass AI can make the biggest difference. We will do a lot of that work together.

What You'll Do

AI Product Execution

• Execute against the Compass AI product roadmap in close collaboration with the VP of Product, translating strategic direction into well-scoped, deliverable work.
• Identify and prioritize high-potential AI use cases across academic advising, enrollment, financial aid, retention, and student wellbeing, drawing on our library of 170+ agent concepts and emerging market signals.
• Contribute to shaping the path from current-state tooling toward agentic, autonomous workflows, including multi-agent coordination, advisor copilots, and proactive outreach systems.
• Surface findings, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly so the VP of Product and broader leadership can make informed decisions quickly.

Discovery & Validation

• Lead structured discovery with institutional customers to validate hypotheses, surface unmet needs, and pressure-test AI concepts before committing to build.
• Spend meaningful time with advisors, enrollment counselors, financial aid staff, and other end users to understand how they work, what slows them down, and where AI can genuinely help. This is a collaborative, hands-on process and you will not be doing it alone.
• Design and run pilots and prototype evaluations, synthesizing feedback to inform what to build next and where to course-correct.
• Help develop and maintain a human-in-the-loop framework that ensures AI recommendations are actionable, trustworthy, and appropriately escalated.

Work Definition & Delivery

• Translate strategy into clear, actionable work across engineering and design: epics, problem statements, user stories, and success criteria that give teams what they need to move without over-specifying implementation.
• Maintain a clear, up-to-date view of what is in progress, what is coming next, and what is changing and why.
• Identify and resolve ambiguity before it reaches engineering. Establish consistent ways of documenting and communicating product decisions.
• Partner closely with engineering to shape solutions, incorporate technical considerations early, and align on expectations before work begins.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Proactively communicate roadmap updates to Sales, Customer Success, and leadership so internal teams always know what is shipping and what is coming.
• Collaborate with Legal, Compliance, and Customer Success to navigate institutional and regulatory considerations as new AI capabilities are introduced.
• Partner with the go-to-market team to ensure AI capabilities are positioned and communicated in ways that land with higher ed audiences.

Platform & Agent Expansion

• Support the expansion of Compass AI's agent library, including agent scope, trigger logic, escalation behavior, and intervention design across student success domains.
• Help drive integration of new AI tooling (LLMs, workflow automation, data pipelines) into the Compass platform in coordination with engineering.
• Stay current on the AI vendor landscape and contribute informed perspective on build vs. buy vs. partner decisions. 

What You'll Bring

Experience

• 5+ years in product management, with demonstrated experience owning complex, cross-functional initiatives from discovery through delivery.
• Direct experience with AI/ML products, including LLM-powered tools, conversational experiences, or autonomous agent systems, ideally in an enterprise or SaaS context.
• Track record of executing effectively within a defined strategy. You know how to take direction, add your own insight, and move things forward.
• Experience in or adjacent to higher education, edtech, or student success platforms is a plus. More important is a genuine curiosity about the space and a drive to understand the people and problems deeply.
• Deep fluency in the AI landscape. You actively track model developments, emerging tooling, agent frameworks, and competitive dynamics, and can translate that signal into clear, grounded implications for a higher ed product portfolio.

Skills & Capabilities

• Strong collaboration skills and the instinct to loop in the right people at the right time, including your VP, rather than going it alone.
• Comfort managing multiple concurrent AI initiatives at different stages of maturity.
• Hands-on familiarity with AI workflow design, prompt engineering, and human-in-the-loop system design.
• Solid product operations fundamentals: roadmap tooling, documentation, stakeholder communication, and keeping work visible (Jira, Airtable, Asana, Confluence, or similar).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain AI concepts clearly to audiences with varying levels of technical fluency.

Key Attributes 

• Comfortable with ambiguity and genuinely motivated to figure things out, especially in a domain you are still learning.
• Patient and empathetic with customers who are new to AI. Higher ed institutions move carefully and that is something to work with, not around.
• Curious about AI in an ongoing way. You follow the space closely and bring informed perspective on what is hype vs. what is ready to ship.
• Collaborative by default. You see the VP of Product as a close partner, not just a manager, and you bring your best thinking to that relationship.