Student Basic Needs Coalition

• Set product direction: Own SBNC’s product vision and strategy, translating organizational goals, student needs, and campus-partner needs into a coherent and prioritized roadmap.
• Align product and organizational strategy: Partner closely with the ED and executive team to align product investment with SBNC’s broader strategy, impact goals, communications, and fundraising priorities.
• Build a repeatable learning process: Establish a consistent approach for identifying barriers to student action, prioritizing hypotheses, and determining which interventions SBNC should test next.
• Build the product function: Hire, mentor, and grow a lean technology team while remaining close to the work as the organization scales.
• Guide responsible AI use: Define where AI belongs in SBNC’s product and evaluate AI-enabled features for efficacy, accuracy, reliability, bias, and safety

• Own product discovery: Design and run qualitative and quantitative research with students, campus partners, and staff to understand needs, behaviors, and opportunities and inform product decisions.
• Diagnose barriers: Identify why students drop off or struggle to complete key actions, develop hypotheses about the causes, and prioritize the barriers most worth addressing.
• Identify partner value: Determine which problems, features, and capabilities campus partners value and may be willing to pay for, using partner feedback, usage data, and pilot results.
• Run rapid experiments: Design lightweight tests of product hypotheses to learn quickly before committing significant engineering resources.
• Interpret evidence rigorously: Assess research, product, and experiment results appropriately, distinguishing directional signals from stronger evidence and avoiding overclaiming from limited data.
• Measure product performance: Partner with data and evaluation staff to define success metrics and assess whether the product and specific changes improve student behavior and outcomes.

• Lead from 0 to 1 and 1 to n: Identify and validate the right problems to solve, define the next core products and AI-enabled capabilities, and bring them to market.
• Stay hands-on: Personally write specs, review designs, unblock engineering, and make day-to-day product judgment calls in a lean team.
• Own roadmap execution: Prioritize and sequence work while balancing speed, quality, learning, and the realities of limited engineering capacity.

We recognize that some individuals from underrepresented backgrounds may hesitate to apply if they don't meet 100% of the listed qualifications. Please don't let that discourage you from applying! We value the unique skills, experiences, and perspectives that each applicant brings, and we encourage you to apply if you believe your background demonstrates the required skills and competencies.

• Commitment to SBNC's mission to help postsecondary students connect to the resources they need to stay enrolled, complete their education, and build a foundation for economic mobility
• Treats students as co-designers, not only people we serve, and prioritizes those facing the greatest barriers first, true to our value of Lead With Students
• Resourceful and brings a sense of urgency to removing friction between students and the benefits they qualify for, while maintaining a high bar for quality and follow-through — our value of Unlock Every Dollar
• Designs for Scale - Thinks a step ahead of where the organization is today, prioritizes what matters most, and builds for the next campus, policy shift, or student barrier before it arrives
• Comfortable wearing multiple hats and Owns the Outcome, asks for help when stuck, and shows up for teammates when it counts. Brings a startup mentality.
• Treats growth and innovation as an ongoing habit and leans on the team to Learn Together by seeking feedback, sharing it openly, and adapting when needed.

• Functional or executive-level leadership experience. 7+ years of management experience while remaining willing and able to perform individual-contributor-level work.
• Track record of taking products from 0 to 1, ideally including experience as an early or founding product leader at a startup or similarly entrepreneurial organization.
• Genuine product research experience, including designing, running, and synthesizing qualitative and quantitative research and experiments and using evidence to drive roadmap decisions.
• Direct experience shipping AI-enabled product features
• Experience in higher education, government benefits, public-sector technology, or another highly regulated or administratively complex environment.
• Strong product judgment under resource constraints, including the ability to prioritize learning and impact over feature volume.
• Experience building products for populations navigating complex or high-stakes systems.

• Location: Fully Remote
• Full-time: 5-day work week, 40-45 hours
• Salary: $170k + 10% annual performance bonus; SBNC benchmarks compensation on a nonprofit pay scale and is committed to transparent, equitable pay practices. Note that salaries/benefits are not negotiable so please ensure that this compensation package works for you before applying.

Candidates must reside within the 50 states or District of Columbia and have full authorization to work in the 50 U.S. states & the District of Columbia (international work abroad, including the U.S. territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, and other islands are excluded). In addition, SBNC doesn't offer employment visa sponsorship.

Building an inclusive, high-performing team that is diverse across lines of personal identity is integral to our success and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.

This means we do not discriminate against any job applicant or employee because of their race, ethnicity, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This applies to all terms and conditions of employment.

We actively strive and evolve to develop and maintain workspaces that are fully inclusive. We encourage candidates from underrepresented groups to apply.