Interested in this AI Product Manager role at Copia Automation?
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Who you are
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We are seeking a Staff Product Manager to lead Copia's fast\-growing AI vertical. You're passionate about turning a fast\-moving vision into products customers love, and you're happy to sit with ambiguity, test your assumptions, and own the outcome.
You've shipped AI products. You know the difference between a demo that impresses and a feature customers will pay for, and you've taken at least one from zero to revenue.
You have strong product instincts about data. You look at the unique value Copia’s product platform has and see the AI products only we can build. You think in terms of durable advantage.
You're as comfortable with go\-to\-market as you are with triaging the backlog. Pricing, packaging, where PLG fits, and the narrative that gets a buyer to value. You enjoy working shoulder\-to\-shoulder with the CEO and Sales on how AI fits the Copia story.
The industrial automation space has lots of industry\-specific information most are not familiar with. In your day\-to\-day, you will learn about a wide variety of industrial automation topics, and you're excited to dig in.
You're interested in Copia's mission, you enjoy interacting with customers, and you want to drive impact in a foundational industry. We're looking for a strong contributor to the overall trajectory of the company.
Bonus points for experience in OT, industrial automation, controls, or cybersecurity, or time spent founding or operating in an early\-stage startup.
Finally, you're optimistic. At Copia, we celebrate successes, support each other through unexpected challenges, and approach problems with a positive attitude.
About us
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Copia Automation provides best\-in\-class disaster and recovery technology for industrial automation.
Our product brings modern developer tools to the OT space through our novel Git\-based source control for automation professionals, with multiple delivery methods including self\-hosted and fully hosted options. We are a well\-funded startup with a growing list of happy customers throughout the industrial space.
As a Copia employee, you'll solve challenging, unique, and meaningful problems alongside passionate coworkers, while we change the way everything gets built.
Why industrial automation?
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Manufacturing is powered by industrial automation \- computerized systems and robotics running on PLCs. This ecosystem uses a unique graphical language that doesn't work with typical developer tools like GitLab or GitHub. Instead, automation professionals rely on physical storage devices, incompatible tools, and incomplete solutions. When minutes of downtime can cost tens of thousands of dollars, better development tools are urgently needed.
Product at Copia
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Copia has more context on what's happening inside customer controls environments than anyone else in this market. That context is why Copia can build AI products our competitors can’t replicate. This role decides what those products are.
It's a principal\-level role because the scope is designing the AI vision, making it something customers pay for, and figuring out how Copia takes a new product line to market. You'll work through collaboration, experimentation, and ownership \- partnering daily with the CEO, whose vision is strong and evolving fast, and turning it into products that ship.
What you'll do:
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- Own Copia Copilot, our existing AI product: code documentation, legacy code interpretation, logic conversion, and outputs that pull from Copia repos and device backups.
- Develop a point of view on what Copia's context actually makes possible: the products only we can build because of what we collect and store for customers.
- Set the AI roadmap, moving from code intelligence today through incident response and into autonomous agents and OT cyber resilience.
- Write specs and work closely day\-to\-day with the AI engineering team.
- Own monetization and go\-to\-market: how new AI products and features get priced and packaged, and where PLG fits so customers reach value before a sales conversation.
- Build technical credibility with enterprise buyers, OT security advisors, and early design partners.
- Partner with the CEO and Sales on the strategic narrative and where AI fits in the Copia story.
- Distill a fast\-moving vision into actionable, shippable products.
What you'll need:
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- A track record shipping AI products to real customers, including at least one taken from zero to revenue.
- Great instincts for prioritization and the ability to take an ambiguous problem and find a clear solution.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain technical details to engineers, executives, and non\-technical stakeholders alike.
- Comfort operating in early\-stage ambiguity: new product line, design partners, no playbook.
- Eagerness to dig into a complex domain. You don't need to know PLCs on day one, but you should be excited to learn how factories run.
Nice to haves:
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- Background in OT, industrial automation, controls, manufacturing software, or cybersecurity.
- Experience at a growth\-stage, venture\-backed startup, or time founding or operating an early\-stage company.
- Experience with developer tools, source control, or DevOps platforms.
- Interest in manufacturing and hardware innovation.
Compensation: $205,000 \- $230,000
- Competitive base salary commensurate with experience and location.
- Meaningful equity in an early\-stage, venture\-backed company.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Unlimited PTO and company holidays.
- 401(k) plan.
- Commuter benefits and in\-office lunches at our NYC HQ.
- Hybrid work environment with relocation assistance available for qualifying candidates.
- A high\-trust, high\-ownership culture where senior leaders are expected to set direction, ship, and grow the people around them.
Copia is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse team and an inclusive culture, and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.
Salary Context
This $205K-$230K range is above the 75th percentile for AI Product Manager roles in our dataset (median: $188K across 140 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 3,708 AI roles we're tracking, AI Product Manager positions make up 5% of the market. At Copia Automation, 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 in Demand for This Role
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 $216,175 based on 270 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $230,000. Disclosed range: $205K to $230K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($300,000) and Research Engineer ($280,000). By seniority level: Entry: $120,000; Mid: $200,000; Senior: $230,000; Director: $272,150; VP: $250,000.
Copia Automation AI Hiring
Copia Automation has 2 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI Product Manager, AI/ML Engineer. Based in New York, NY, US. Compensation range: $226K - $230K.
Location Context
AI roles in New York pay a median of $220,000 across 1,045 tracked positions.
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 3,708 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 102 entry-level, 1,705 mid-level, 1,469 senior, and 432 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 14% of the market (508 positions). The remaining 3,180 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($300,000 median, 21 roles); Research Engineer ($280,000 median, 147 roles); AI Architect ($254,798 median, 67 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 3,708 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,605), Data Scientist (310), AI Software Engineer (259). 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 (102) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,705) and senior (1,469) 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 432 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 14% of all AI roles (508 positions), with 3,180 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 $217,500. Top-quartile roles start at $272,100, and the 90th percentile reaches $325,000. 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 $300,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. 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 (1,890 postings), Aws (1,103 postings), Azure (877 postings), Rag (855 postings), Gcp (631 postings), Prompt Engineering (560 postings), Pytorch (545 postings), Claude (498 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
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