---
title: 'Senior Product Manager at Playlab'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-manager-playlab-remote-bxwqb5j2k1qv'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-09'
---

# Senior Product Manager at Playlab

- **Company:** Playlab
- **Location:** Remote
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Playlab/f8b16f4b-408e-4a9f-9a33-93fe05cf644e

## Job description

## About Playlab

Playlab is a tech non-profit dedicated to helping educators and students become critical consumers and creators of AI. We believe that an open-source, community-driven approach is key to harnessing the potential of AI in education. AI is a new design material and should be shaped by many to bring their ideas about learning to life. We equip communities with software and hands-on learning that empowers educators & students to build AI apps for their unique context. If you're passionate about building creative, equitable futures for students and teachers, we hope you'll join us.

## The Role

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role for someone who wants to shape how educators and students build with AI. Your product work will:

- Expand what's possible: Add new capabilities (e.g., components, agents) that expands how creators craft ai native software for their contexts.
- Deepen the context: Build on our current work on curriculum knowledge graphs and organizational knowledge bases to deepen how creators can leverage their context.
- Set the safety standard: Push the boundaries on what responsible and safe AI in education looks like. This includes advancing our moderation and safety systems; supporting learnability, legibility, and interpretability within the product; collaborating with key ecosystem partners; and open sourcing as much of this work as we can to advance the ecosystem.

You'll work directly with our CTO, engineering team, ML team, designers, and partnerships team. You'll hear directly from educators through our deep partner relationships. And you'll make product decisions that affect how educators and learners across the globe experience AI in education. This role requires comfort with ambiguity. Playlab is an early-stage product with significant scope, a growing team, and limited existing product process. You'll need to build that process as you go and not wait for someone to hand it to you. If you need a lot of structure to do your best work, this isn't the right fit. If you thrive when you can shape the environment around you, read on.

## What You'll Do

Drive Product Execution

- Prioritize ruthlessly, write clear specs, and work with design, engineering, and learning teams to ship
- De-risk builds by breaking work into meaningful increments that let us learn as we go
- Make tradeoffs when scope, timeline, and resources collide and communicate those tradeoffs clearly

Go Deep on the Details

- Write detailed requirements that align design, engineering, and go-to-market teams
- Understand the technical constraints and possibilities, and work side-by-side with engineering
- Engage directly with users, and gather user feedback, usage data, and partner insights to inform decisions

Build Product Process

- Establish rituals, artifacts, and communication patterns that help a growing team stay aligned
- Create clarity about how product decisions get made, without slowing the team down
- Document what's working so others can build on it

Collaborate Across Teams

- Work with Learning and Partnerships to translate field feedback into clear priorities and simpler designs
- Coordinate with design to ensure what we build is usable, not just functional

Refine Strategy as You Learn

- Pressure-test strategic assumptions against what you see in the product and hear from users
- Surface when priorities should shift, and make the case with evidence
- Help leadership make better decisions by bringing clarity to ambiguous situations

You Might Be a Fit If You...

- Have 7+ years of product management experience, including at least one early-stage or high-growth environment where you had to build process, not just follow it
- Have led product development for AI-powered or technically complex products—you can work fluently with ML and engineering teams
- Get energy from the details: you'd rather write a clear spec than a strategy deck
- Ship fast without cutting corners: you know how to de-risk builds and make incremental progress
- Thrive in ambiguity and can make good decisions with incomplete information
- Communicate crisply: you can explain complex tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences
- Care about education, equity, or mission-driven work; this isn't just a job, it's a chance to shape how AI shows up in schools

Bonus Points For...

- Experience in edtech or deep familiarity with how products land in K-12 or higher ed environments
- Background working on platforms or tools where users build things (not just consume content)
- Experience with responsible AI, content moderation, or trust & safety product work
- Deep familiarity with the AI/LLM product landscape

Why Join Us? Build the Product Function: You'll be Playlab's first PM and will get the chance to shape how product management works here. Meaningful Scope: You'll own strategic pillars that directly affect whether educators can build AI tools that transform their classrooms. Mission-Aligned Team: Join a small, passionate group committed to equity, creativity, and joyful learning. Direct User Connection: Playlab's deep partnerships mean you'll hear directly from educators Flexible Work: Remote-first environment with autonomy and a strong culture of collaboration. Occasional travel for partner meetings and team gatherings. Competitive Pay & Benefits: Includes salary, healthcare, retirement, generous time off, and opportunities for professional growth.

## About Playlab

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: A 501(c)(3) nonprofit that builds open AI infrastructure for education, enabling educators and students to create, customize, and share their own AI tools.
- **Entity Type**: Private nonprofit (501c3) – early stage / grant-funded
- **Headquarters**: United States (operates across 7 countries including Canada, Poland, Australia, and Senegal)
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Yusuf Ahmad (Co-Founder, CEO) and Ian Serlin (Co-Founder, CTO)

## Core Business
- **Industries**: Education Technology, AI Infrastructure, K-12 / Higher Education
- **Target Customers**: B2B – educators, schools, districts, and impact organizations; also directly serves students.
- **Mission**: “Create a future where educators and students around the world have the agency to not just use AI, but to shape it on their terms, as part of a global community working to improve education.”

## Products & Services
- **Playlab Platform**: A web-based AI app builder that allows educators to create custom AI tools (e.g., lesson planners, quiz generators, rubric writers) without coding. Key features include customizable guardrails, choice of underlying AI models, pre-built curriculum knowledge graphs, and a library of educator-built apps that can be remixed. Integrates with platforms like Google Drive, Clever, and Canvas. Free for educators; paid partnership tiers for schools and districts.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not applicable (nonprofit); no disclosed valuation.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding – $25,000 grant (led by Fast Forward, March 2024). Annual revenue not publicly available.
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Fast Forward (grant); partnerships with organizations like Illustrative Mathematics, Open Up Resources (curriculum knowledge graphs).
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 178.9% YoY (from ~10 to 44 employees); expanding into multiple countries; building a fellowship program and workshops for educators.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Open infrastructure**: Educators maintain full ownership and transparency over AI tools – unlike for-profit “black box” products.
- **Educator‑driven community**: Apps are built and remixed by educators themselves, creating a collaborative commons.
- **Knowledge graphs**: Pre‑built curriculum knowledge maps (e.g., Illustrative Mathematics) that let AI reason relationally, not just by keywords.
- **Full visibility and safety**: Teachers see every student interaction, receive automated safety flags, and can customize guardrails.
- **Nonprofit mission**: Focused on impact rather than user growth or seat‑based pricing.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Democratizing AI adoption in education by making it as accessible as Scratch and as robust as Hugging Face; expanding partnerships with school districts; developing open‑source AI and research data; scaling the platform’s interoperability with existing school tools.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Mission‑driven, educator‑focused, collaborative team of “educators, technologists, and designers.” Emphasis on agency, openness, and real‑world impact.
- **Remote / Hybrid**: Likely remote‑friendly (headquarters in US but team across 7 countries); specific policy not stated.
- **Notable perks**: Free platform for all educators; professional development through workshops and fellowships; opportunity to shape public‑good AI infrastructure; small, growing team with high autonomy.

## Sources
1. [playlab.ai/about](https://www.playlab.ai/about)
2. [playlab.ai/](https://www.playlab.ai/)
3. [LinkedIn - Playlab](https://www.linkedin.com/company/playlab-ai)
4. [Playlab Documentation - The Playlab Difference](https://playlabai.mintlify.app/faq/The%20Playlab%20Difference)

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