---
title: 'Senior Product Manager at FriendliAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-manager-friendliai-seoul-4m595cm48pr7'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Senior Product Manager at FriendliAI

- **Company:** FriendliAI
- **Location:** Seoul, South Korea
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-03-15
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/friendliai/a6364382-e30a-4a30-919d-2c6b6c78185a

## Job description

## About the Job

FriendliAI is seeking a Senior Product Manager to drive the strategy and execution of our AI inference platform. This is an individual contributor role with significant product leadership responsibility, including guiding junior Product Managers and Product Designers across shared product areas. You will own key product initiatives end-to-end while helping raise the overall bar for product thinking, execution, and decision-making within the product organization. This role sits at the intersection of customer needs, engineering reality, and business strategy, and plays a critical role in how FriendliAI’s platform evolves as we scale.

## Key Responsibilities

- Own product strategy and roadmap for core areas of FriendliAI’s inference platform, including model APIs, deployment workflows, and developer-facing features.
- Lead product initiatives end-to-end, from discovery and prioritization through delivery and iteration.
- Guide and mentor junior Product Managers and Product Designers by setting direction, reviewing work, and providing structured feedback.
- Drive customer discovery through interviews, design partnerships, usage data analysis, and direct engagement with enterprise and developer users.
- Identify high-impact opportunities by analyzing market trends, competitive landscape, and emerging patterns in AI inference and infrastructure.
- Translate customer and business needs into clear product requirements, user stories, and success metrics.
- Partner closely with engineering and research teams to scope solutions, make tradeoffs, and deliver high-quality outcomes.
- Collaborate with GTM, Sales, and Solutions teams to support customer conversations, roadmap alignment, and product positioning.
- Define and track product success metrics and KPIs, using data and feedback to guide prioritization and iteration.
- Clearly communicate product vision, priorities, and tradeoffs to stakeholders across the company.

## Qualifications

- 6+ years of product management experience, with demonstrated ownership of complex products or platforms.
- Experience acting as a product lead on initiatives involving multiple PMs and/or Designers, even in an IC role.
- Strong technical fluency and the ability to work closely with senior engineers on infrastructure-heavy systems.
- Familiarity with AI/ML systems, particularly inference, deployment, or production AI workflows.
- Proven ability to drive product direction in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Strong judgment and structured decision-making skills.

## Preferred Experience

- Experience with AI inference platforms, LLM deployment, or GPU-based infrastructure.
- Experience building developer platforms, APIs, or internal frameworks.
- Exposure to multi-tenant SaaS or cloud-native architectures.
- Experience in a high-growth startup or scale-up environment.
- Background in computer science, engineering, or a closely related field.

## Benefits

- Flexible working hours
- Daily lunch and dinner provided; unlimited snacks and beverages
- Supportive and highly collaborative work environment
- Health check-up support and top-tier equipment/hardware support
- A front-row seat to the generative AI infrastructure revolution
- Competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and other benefits.

## About FriendliAI

FriendliAI is building the world’s best AI inference platform that makes large language and multi-modal models fast, efficient, and deployable at scale. We power high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads for organizations worldwide and integrate directly with Hugging Face, giving developers instant access to over 600,000 open-source models. We are a small, fast-moving team doing work that matters at one of the most exciting moments in the history of technology. With our world-class inference engine, we are building a platform that the AI industry can actually rely on.

## About FriendliAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: FriendliAI is The Frontier AI Inference Cloud, providing a highly optimized platform for deploying, scaling, and monitoring large language and multimodal models with unmatched speed and cost efficiency.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; $26.7M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States (with offices in Seoul, South Korea and Redwood City, CA)
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Byung-Gon Chun (CEO) and Gyeong-In Yu (CTO) – the researchers who invented the continuous batching technique now standard in AI inference.

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI Infrastructure / Cloud Inference Platform (Infrastructure as a Service)
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises and AI teams deploying generative AI and agent workloads at production scale; focuses on open-weight and custom models.
- **Mission**: Democratize access to production-grade AI so teams can focus on building great products.

## Products & Services
- **[FriendliAI Inference Cloud](https://friendli.ai/)**: A fully managed platform that instantly deploys 580,000+ Hugging Face models (language, audio, vision) with one click. Supports bring-your-own fine-tuned or proprietary models. Key features:
  - Custom GPU kernels, smart caching, continuous batching, speculative decoding, and parallel inference.
  - 2×+ faster inference than standard solutions, up to 3× faster than vLLM.
  - 50% to 90% cost savings relative to closed model APIs.
  - 99.99% uptime SLAs, geo-distributed infrastructure, enterprise-grade fault tolerance.
  - SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliant (March 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $26.7M (two seed rounds: $6.7M in 2021 and $20M led by Capstone Partners in September 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Capstone Partners (lead investor in latest round), plus two other investors in the first seed round.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew 90% YoY to ~45 employees (as of mid-2026).
  - Active job postings: 19 positions (up 1800% YoY) – strong hiring momentum.
  - Appointed Brian Yoo (former Moloco COO) as Chief Business Officer in April 2026 to drive hypergrowth.
  - Achieved SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance in March 2026, opening regulated markets.
  - LinkedIn followers grew 257% yearly (8,221 followers).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Inventor of continuous batching** – the technique is now industry standard, giving FriendliAI deep technical expertise.
- **Purpose-built inference engine** that constantly evolves for state-of-the-art models, delivering 2–3× speed improvements over alternatives like vLLM.
- **Massive model library** – 580,000+ Hugging Face models deployable instantly with zero manual optimization.
- **Enterprise-grade reliability** – 99.99% SLA, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, multi-cloud scaling.
- **Cost leadership** – 50–90% savings vs. closed model APIs, maximizing tokens per dollar.

## Strategic Focus
- **Hypergrowth** – scaling sales, engineering, and solutions architecture teams globally (US and Korea).
- **Compliance and enterprise readiness** – recent SOC 2/HIPAA certification to serve healthcare and regulated industries.
- **Multi-cloud and geo-distribution** – expanding infrastructure footprint for global low-latency inference.
- **Open-weight and custom model support** – enabling model ownership and flexibility for enterprises.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Boldest innovations come from great teams” – passionate, humble, curious builders. Mission-driven to democratize AI.
- **Work policy**: Hybrid (San Francisco and Seoul offices); some roles are in-office (Seoul) or hybrid (SF). Employees engage in a mix of remote and on-site work.
- **Engineering focus**: Heavy emphasis on AI inference engine, GPU kernels, Python developer tools, AI agents, backend, and platform security. High technical bar.
- **Perks**: Not explicitly listed, but fast-growing startup with significant impact in the AI infrastructure space; opportunity to work on cutting-edge inference optimization.
- **Locations**: San Francisco (HQ), Redwood City, CA, and Gangnam-gu, Seoul – global team with cross-cultural collaboration.

## Sources
1. [friendli.ai](https://friendli.ai/)
2. [friendli.ai/careers](https://friendli.ai/careers)
3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/friendliai](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/friendliai)
4. [builtin.com/company/friendliai](https://builtin.com/company/friendliai)
5. [linkedin.com/company/friendliai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/friendliai)

## Other roles at FriendliAI

- [Director of Product Management](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-product-management-friendliai-san-francisco-vckbhh439mws) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer - Full Stack](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-full-stack-friendliai-seoul-2kvnfm2hejx8) — Seoul, South Korea
- [Software Engineer – Cloud Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-cloud-infrastructure-friendliai-san-francisco-z8fjtpn12kpn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer - Cloud Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-cloud-infrastructure-friendliai-seoul-rf473fpa9850) — Seoul, South Korea
- [Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-friendliai-san-francisco-z6e1g3bcymfg) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer – Python Developer Tools](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-python-developer-tools-friendliai-seoul-z74wd9kp8fex) — Seoul, South Korea
- [Software Engineer – GPU Kernel](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-gpu-kernel-friendliai-seoul-yg1eq3ks7m5a) — Seoul, South Korea
- [Software Engineer – AI Inference Engine](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-ai-inference-engine-friendliai-seoul-8pdpe18z4ejk) — Seoul, South Korea
- [Customer Success Engineer (contract based)](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-success-engineer-contract-based-friendliai-seoul-9ang4dybr9c9) — Seoul, South Korea
- [Software Engineer - Senior Backend](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-senior-backend-friendliai-san-francisco-h5x2ghcnfrg7) — San Francisco, CA