Interested in this AI Product Manager role at Collectors?
Apply Now →Skills & Technologies
About This Role
Collectors is the leading creator of innovative technology that provides value-added services for collectors worldwide. We grade, authenticate, vault, and sell millions of record-setting collectibles, all while modernizing and digitalizing the process to further our mission of helping collectors pursue their passions. We’re always on the lookout for talented people to join our growing team.
Our services span collectible trading cards, autographs, comic books, coins, video games, event tickets, and memorabilia. Our subsidiaries include PSA, PCGS, Beckett, SGC, and Card Ladder.
Since our founding in 1986, we have graded and authenticated millions of items. We employ more than 3000 people across our headquarters in Santa Ana, California and offices in New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, Germany, the UK, and France.
As part of our interview process, we request that candidates have their cameras on during video interviews. This helps foster meaningful conversation and allows us to create an experience that closely resembles our standard working environment. Certain interview steps may take place by phone. For remote roles, and at our discretion, candidates may be asked to participate in an on-site interview as part of the final stages of the process.
We understand there may be occasional circumstances requiring accommodation and are happy to discuss them as needed. Your recruiter will be able to clarify expectations and answer any questions you have.
Overview
This team, AI Research & Engineering (AIRE), builds the applied machine learning systems that run our business at scale, from prototype to production. This role is ideal for a product manager who is equally comfortable sourcing training data and writing evals for our models, standing up production-ready pipelines, and shipping tools that help internal teams make better decisions. You'll work across computer vision, structured data, and agentic AI workflows, with direct impact on products used by graders, researchers, and collectors. Every one of those products is only as good as the data behind it, and you'll own that data from first capture to final correction.
As a Staff Product Manager , you'll decide what training data we collect, in what order, and how human corrections flow back into our models, partnering closely with ML Engineering and subject matter experts to improve model accuracy, development speed, and cost across the portfolio. You'll bring the technical fluency to earn credibility with engineers, the judgment to turn ambiguous problems into clear strategy, and the systems thinking to build feedback loops that make every model better than the last.
What You’ll Do
- Set strategy and make the calls: Define the strategy for our training data capabilities, prioritize what data we collect and when, and own decisions around quality, review depth, confidence thresholds, and cost.
- Build the data collection pipeline: Own data collection end to end, including procurement, preparation, capture, expert labeling, and annotation, and build scalable systems across each stage.
- Optimize for throughput: Coordinate work across teams and sites to maximize throughput, identify bottlenecks, and drive capacity planning across specialties and locations.
- Own human-in-the-loop workflows: Partner with subject matter experts and power users to define review processes and feedback loops that turn human corrections into valuable training data.
- Partner across functions: Work closely with ML Engineering, Operations, and subject matter experts to set direction, align priorities, and drive execution without relying on direct authority.
- Measure and iterate: Define the metrics that demonstrate data quality, model improvement, throughput, and cost efficiency, and communicate progress and tradeoffs to senior leadership.
- Raise the bar across Product: Mentor other Product Managers, contribute to product practices, and build documentation and mechanisms that help scale product thinking across the organization.
- Build with AI: Use emerging AI tools and coding agents, including Claude Cowork, Claude Code, and Codex, to accelerate product development, improve workflows, and find new ways to operate at scale.
Who You Are
- 10+ years of product management experience , including experience building a product, platform, or capability from the ground up.
- Strategic and execution-oriented: You can set direction, make tradeoffs, influence operational decisions, and drive execution in ambiguous environments.
- Experience with AI
- /ML or AI-Enabled Operational Workflows: You’ve worked on products where both models and human expertise play a role, and understand how to design workflows that leverage both effectively.
- Strong systems thinker: You can identify constraints across complex, multi-step workflows and understand how changes in one part of a system impact throughput, quality, and cost elsewhere.
- Comfortable owning business outcomes: You’ve owned metrics tied to cost, efficiency, quality, or other measurable business outcomes and use data to drive decisions.
- Strong partner and influencer: You build credibility with technical teams, operators, and subject matter experts and can influence effectively without direct authority.
- Hands-on builder: You’re comfortable rolling up your sleeves to establish new processes, pipelines, documentation, and operating mechanisms. The first year will involve significant 0-to-1 work.
- Exceptional written communication: You can clearly articulate strategy, plans, tradeoffs, and decisions for both technical and business audiences.
- Willingness to travel: This role will require travel to multiple data collection sites, approximately once per month to once per quarter .
Salary Range
The salary range for this position is $165,848 - $269,259 . Actual compensation on this range varies based on a variety of non-discriminatory factors, including location, job level, prior experience, and skill set. This role may be eligible for bonuses, commissions, or other forms of compensation, please ask your recruiter for details.
Reasons To Join Us:
- Health Insurance: All full-time employees are eligible to enroll in Medical, Dental, and Vision
- Additional Benefits: Full-time employees are eligible for fertility, commuter, and educational assistance benefits.
- 401(K) Matching Plan: We are proud to offer a competitive 401k matching plan to our employees to support their future financial goals
- Vacation: All salaried employees are eligible for flexible time-off.
- Holiday Pay: All regular, full-time employees are eligible for ten company paid holidays
- Employee Discounts: Employees receive discounts on select grading services for approved submissions
- Flexible Hours: Many of our teams offer flexible schedules with varying shifts and will work with you to accommodate your needs
- Fun Working Environment: Our team members are invited to participate in celebrations, holiday events, and team building activities
Collectors uses e-Verify to validate your ability to work legally in the United States.
We are aware that there are instances where individuals are receiving job offers that fraudulently allege to be from Collectors or one of our business units. This type of fraud can be carried out through false websites, through fake e-mails claiming to be from the company or through social media. We never ask for personal information such as your bank account, Social Security numbers or National IDs, nor do we send or request payments for the purchase of business-related equipment. If you suspect fraud, please reach out to [email protected].
We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, national origin, gender, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or parental status, disability, veteran status, or other class protected by applicable law. We believe that a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills will better service the diverse community of collectors we support.
If you require an accommodation to apply or interview with us due to a disability or special need, please email [email protected]
U.S. residents: for disclosures relating to personal information we collect during the employment application and recruitment process, please see our Privacy Notice for U.S. Applicants .
Salary Context
This $165K-$269K range is above the median for AI Product Manager roles in our dataset (median: $194K across 123 roles with salary data).
View full AI Product Manager salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI Product Managers define what AI features get built and why. They translate business problems into ML-solvable tasks, work with engineering to scope model requirements, and own the metrics that determine if an AI feature is working. The role requires a rare combination of technical fluency and product instinct.
Unlike traditional product management, AI PM work involves managing uncertainty at a fundamental level. Your model might work 90% of the time. What happens the other 10%? What's the user experience when the AI is wrong? How do you measure 'good enough' for a probabilistic system? These questions don't have easy answers, and the AI PM is the person responsible for finding them.
Across the 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, AI Product Manager positions make up 5% of the market. At Collectors, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
AI Product Manager roles are growing as companies realize that shipping AI features requires different product thinking than traditional software. The best candidates combine product management experience with enough technical depth to have productive conversations with ML engineers about model capabilities and limitations.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week includes: reviewing model evaluation results with the ML team, defining success metrics for a new AI feature, conducting user research on how customers respond to AI-generated outputs, writing product requirements that include accuracy thresholds and fallback behaviors, and presenting the AI roadmap to leadership. You're the translator between technical capability and business value.
AI Product Manager roles are growing as companies realize that shipping AI features requires different product thinking than traditional software. The best candidates combine product management experience with enough technical depth to have productive conversations with ML engineers about model capabilities and limitations.
Skills Required
Technical fluency with ML concepts is essential, though you won't be writing models. Expect to understand training data, evaluation metrics, model limitations, and responsible AI practices. SQL and basic Python are increasingly expected. Experience with A/B testing, data analysis, and product analytics is baseline. Understanding LLM capabilities and limitations is now a core requirement.
The differentiator is AI-specific product thinking: knowing when to use ML vs. heuristics, understanding the cost of training data collection, designing graceful degradation for model failures, and building products that improve with usage data. Experience with AI safety, bias mitigation, and responsible AI deployment is increasingly important.
Strong postings describe specific AI products the PM will own, mention the ML team structure, and talk about measurement methodology. Look for companies that have already shipped AI features. Roles at companies that are 'exploring AI' often mean you'll spend a year defining the strategy before any building happens.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI Product Manager roles pay a median of $220,200 based on 947 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $229,300. Disclosed range: $165K to $269K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($256,000) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $111,000; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $229,300; Director: $272,300; VP: $235,830.
Collectors AI Hiring
Collectors has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI Product Manager. Based in CA, US. Compensation range: $269K - $269K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 6% (531 positions) offer remote work, while 8,478 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (3,078 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,646 roles, $261,000 median); Los Angeles (1,486 roles, $210,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI Product Manager roles include Product Manager, Data Analyst, Technical Program Manager.
From here, career progression typically leads toward Director of AI Product, VP Product, Head of AI.
The most effective path is PM experience plus self-directed AI education. Take Andrew Ng's courses, build a small ML project, and learn enough Python to read model evaluation code. The goal isn't to become an ML engineer. It's to have credibility in technical conversations and to understand what's possible, what's hard, and what's a bad idea.
What to Expect in Interviews
AI interviews typically combine coding challenges (Python-focused), system design questions tailored to the role, and discussions about your experience with relevant tools and frameworks. Strong candidates demonstrate both technical depth and the ability to make pragmatic engineering tradeoffs. Prepare portfolio projects that demonstrate end-to-end capability rather than isolated skills.
When evaluating opportunities: Strong postings describe specific AI products the PM will own, mention the ML team structure, and talk about measurement methodology. Look for companies that have already shipped AI features. Roles at companies that are 'exploring AI' often mean you'll spend a year defining the strategy before any building happens.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 9,079 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 106 entry-level, 4,384 mid-level, 3,343 senior, and 1,246 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (531 positions). The remaining 8,478 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($256,000 median, 66 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 457 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 55 roles).
AI Product Manager roles are growing as companies realize that shipping AI features requires different product thinking than traditional software. The best candidates combine product management experience with enough technical depth to have productive conversations with ML engineers about model capabilities and limitations.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 9,079 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,862), AI Product Manager (453), AI Software Engineer (451). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (106) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,384) and senior (3,343) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,246 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (531 positions), with 8,478 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,000. Top-quartile roles start at $263,911, and the 90th percentile reaches $318,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $256,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,649 postings), Aws (898 postings), Azure (723 postings), Rag (671 postings), Gcp (536 postings), Pytorch (434 postings), Claude (410 postings), Kubernetes (406 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
Get Weekly AI Career Intelligence
Salary data, skills demand, and market signals from 16,000+ AI job postings. Every Monday.