Founding Product Manager, Media
Posted on January 22, 2026 (about 3 hours ago)
Company Overview:
We are building Protege to solve the biggest unmet need in AI - getting access to the right training data. The current process is time intensive, expensive, and often unsuccessful. The Protege platform facilitates the secure, efficient, and privacy-centric exchange of AI training data.
Solving AI’s data problem is a generational opportunity. We are backed by world-class investors and power partnerships with ambitious AI teams. The company that succeeds will be one of the largest in AI and in tech.
We are a lean, fast-moving, high-trust team of builders who value velocity and impact. Our culture suits people who thrive on ambiguity, own outcomes, and want to shape the future of data and AI.
The Opportunity
We are hiring a Founding Product Manager to lead product development for Protege’s media business. With several media customers and a full pipeline, you will mature the product suite serving the media vertical. Opportunities include data ingestion and delivery systems, UIs, and potential data products.
Initially, you will bridge engineering, product, and partnerships to ensure millions of hours of content flow through Protege’s ingestion, normalization, and metadata enrichment pipelines. You will build a cross-functional product roadmap and translate opportunities into clear engineering requirements, overseeing development, QA, and rollouts.
What You’ll Do
- Define, prioritize, and execute the roadmap for Protege’s media business, starting with data ingestion/processing and content visibility/searchability projects
- Work with external partners and internal teams to understand pain points and prioritize solutions
- Translate abstract problems (for example, partner ingestion bottlenecks) into actionable, measurable engineering work
- Manage backlog, tradeoffs, and stakeholder communication with precision and transparency
- Understand how AI developers use media embeddings and metadata downstream, ensuring data quality aligns with use case needs
- As a founding team member, contribute to product culture, hiring, and process definition
Who You Are
- 4–7 years of product management experience, with at least 1–2 years managing data-processing solutions (ingesting, cleaning, transforming, transcoding, delivering, etc.)
- Product management experience in an early-stage startup
- Proven ability to work closely with engineers and data scientists to ship complex, multi-system products
- Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership skills; able to align business and technical teams around shared goals
- Structured thinker who thrives in ambiguity and is comfortable owning outcomes end-to-end
- Comfortable with early-stage constraints: limited resources, shifting priorities, and wearing multiple hats
- Familiarity with media data (file formats, metadata, delivery and storage mechanisms) or the ability to become an expert quickly
Bonus if you have these experiences:
- Experience with media content management, transcoding, or machine learning pipelines
- Familiarity with tools like AWS S3, FFMPEG, TwelveLabs, or similar video AI platforms
- Exposure to retrieval, search, or embedding-based applications
Why Product at Protege
- Build products and grow the product team at a company on a trajectory to support the entire AI market
- Collaborate with exceptional engineers, data scientists, and partners across the AI ecosystem
- Solve complex technical challenges around making AI-ready data accessible, directly impacting the future of AI
How to Apply
Please apply via the job application on the Protege careers page. Click the "Apply for this Job" button or visit the online application URL for this posting.
Application URL: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/protege/312250de-7d76-4657-9838-403af3550aee/application
Application Process
After submitting your application, the Protege team will review and reach out with next steps if your background is a match.