Product Manager, Optimizer

Timely is an education technology company building AI-powered tools to optimize K–12 school scheduling. The Product Manager, Optimizer will own the strategy and end-to-end experience for helping school schedulers move from constraints to optimized schedules, partnering closely with engineering on algorithms, experiments, metrics, and product requirements. The role also involves using generative AI to improve scheduling optimization and communicating product decisions to stakeholders.

Responsibilities:

• Engage with customers to understand opportunities to generate better K12 school schedules
• Dive deep enough into the optimizer technology and scheduling domain to facilitate critical decisions with our engineering team. Drive those decisions forward with accountability
• Partner with Engineering to surface and refine improvements to the optimizer’s core algorithms, model-builders, and orchestration pipeline to meet user needs
• Collaborate with engineering to design and execute experiments that test optimizer changes, defining consistent performance and quality metrics (e.g., feasibility rate, schedule quality scores, solve time, constraint violations) that determine whether an enhancement is actually working
• Craft optimizer product requirements: defining and refining new product features that are built on (and inspire) new computational capabilities. Work with engineering (and AI agents) to break down requirements into well-defined stories
• Leverage AI to knit together requirements, story definition, and development workflows
• Develop and implement a vision for how generative AI can improve algorithmic optimization of schedules
• Own the end-to-end experience of how school schedulers interact with the optimizer — including how results, tradeoffs, and edge cases like infeasible or sub-optimal solutions are communicated and resolved
• Drive goal- and metric-setting processes with Engineering to motivate and measure optimizer squad outcomes
• Foster a culture of delivering value by setting and adjusting milestones, maintaining high standards, and keeping the team focused on impact
• Communicate product and technology decisions with clarity, ensuring internal and external stakeholders understand priorities and the reasoning behind them

Requirements:

• You're energized by complex, technical problems — not just user experience problems, but the mechanics of how math + compute + expertise can solve real-world challenges. You're comfortable digging into solution metrics and user edge cases, working with Engineering to understand tradeoffs (e.g., speed vs. quality vs. feasibility), and turning that understanding into clear product decisions. You take ownership, communicate progress effectively, and adapt quickly in a fast-paced startup environment
• 4+ years in B2B SaaS product organizations, with at least 3 years as a Product Manager
• Experience working on products with an algorithmic, decision-support, or operations research core — you don't need to build the solvers yourself, but you should be comfortable partnering closely with the people who do
• Strong in data analysis and metric design, with the ability to design experiments and interpret their results
• Strong user-centric story writing and mastery of agile toolsets (e.g., Jira, Notion, Miro, etc.)
• Demonstrated experience using AI-enabled SDLC practices to streamline the discover-define-build-test-learn loop
• Collaborative by default, detail-oriented problem solver, and a visual communicator (e.g., mockups, sketches, diagrams, journey maps, etc.)
• Background in EdTech and/or education sector
• experience with optimization, decision-support systems, constraint satisfaction, or algorithmic products
• familiarity with A/B testing or experimentation frameworks
• background in operations research or a technical discipline