Lead Product Manager

About the role

You will own the end-to-end growth funnel for Paraform's marketplace, defining the strategy and execution roadmap for candidate acquisition, onboarding, and discovery. You will partner tightly with Engineering, Design, Data, and Go-to-Market to identify high-impact experiments and ship features that move the needle on core growth metrics. This role demands a product leader who thrives on data, operates with extreme ownership, and builds alignment across distributed teams to test, learn, and scale initiatives rapidly. You will be accountable for improving key funnel metrics such as signups, activation, retention, and conversion while mentoring a small growth pod over time to sustain hypergrowth.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Define and own the end-to-end growth funnel for candidate acquisition, onboarding, and discovery, setting hypotheses, metrics, and rollout plans.
• Run weekly experiments with clear hypotheses, success metrics, and rollout plans to drive improvements in conversion and engagement.
• Build and maintain attribution models and dashboards to track CAC, payback, channel quality, candidate referral coefficient, and loop velocity.
• Improve top-of-funnel scale by optimizing paid, organic, partnerships, and referral channels to increase visit-to-signup conversion.
• Design and optimize candidate referral programs to make sharing and inviting easy, rewarding, and scalable within the network.
• Identify and scale viral loop opportunities where invited candidates can discover relevant roles, join Paraform, and refer more candidates.
• Reduce time-to-value for new candidates by simplifying first-run setup and key activation steps to accelerate onboarding.
• Increase completion rates through better UX, improved sequencing, and contextual guidance tailored to user segments.
• Personalize onboarding flows by segment and measure their impact on activation, retention, and downstream quality outcomes.
• Enhance matching, search, and recommendations to improve relevance, trust, and downstream outcomes such as conversations and interviews.
• Drive repeat engagement through loops like saved searches, notifications, follow-ups, referrals, and shareable candidate or role moments.
• Partner with Data to instrument events, validate insights, and use data rigorously to inform product decisions and prioritize roadmap work.
• Collaborate with Go-to-Market to align product initiatives with revenue, retention, and market dynamics, ensuring product decisions support business goals.
• Lead and grow a small growth pod, setting direction, removing blockers, and fostering a culture of experimentation and accountability.
• Translate business objectives into product roadmaps, balancing quick wins against long-term strategic bets in the hiring marketplace.

Requirements

• At least 4 years of product management experience, with a strong track record of delivering results in a high-growth environment.
• At least 2 years of growth product experience, focusing on funnels, experiments, and scalable acquisition initiatives.
• A data analytics background is preferred, with the ability to form hypotheses, run tests, and interpret results.
• Marketplace experience is preferred, understanding dynamics between supply and demand sides in two-sided networks.
• Marketing and Go-to-Market experience is preferred, aligning product strategy with channel strategy and campaign execution.
• Experience leading 0→1 or step-function growth initiatives, including building instrumentation and proving impact from the start.
• Leadership and team-building experience, with a history of influencing peers and stakeholders without direct authority.
• Strong communication skills, able to distill complex problems and trade-offs into clear decisions and narratives for diverse audiences.
• Comfort operating with incomplete information and making timely decisions in a fast-moving startup environment.
• Demonstrated ownership, bias for action, and accountability for outcomes even when working on ambiguous, cross-functional problems.

Nice to have

• Experience building and scaling growth teams or pods focused on experimentation and acquisition.
• Deep familiarity with hiring and recruiting workflows, pain points, and stakeholders across candidates and enterprises.
• Prior work with AI-native products or tooling that augments human workflows in production environments.
• Experience with A/B testing platforms, analytics tools, and data modeling for growth scenarios.
• Knowledge of referral program design and incentives that drive high-quality candidate sharing.
• Exposure to marketplace liquidity challenges and techniques to balance supply and demand in real time.

Practical notes

Full-time position located in San Francisco. Visa sponsorship is considered on a case-by-case basis. The role reports to the CTO and is expected to support the company's hypergrowth trajectory by operating at speed with rigorous prioritization.