Sr. Forward Deployed Product Manager

Axle is the AI-native clearinghouse for insurance. Our infrastructure and AI agents automate complex insurance workflows between carriers and third parties including insurance verification, monitoring, and policy updates.

The multi-trillion dollar insurance industry still relies on phone calls, paper forms, and outdated systems that are slow, error-prone, and easy to fake.

That’s where Axle comes in. We bridge the gap between insurance and other industries through an AI Native Clearinghouse for insurance, enabling our clients to make business decisions in seconds instead of hours while allowing consumers to unlock their most underutilized financial asset - insurance.

We are backed by leading investors including Y Combinator, Google’s AI fund Gradient Ventures, and angels from companies like Plaid and Cox Automotive.

Our team is in-person 4 days a week in our Flatiron/NoMad office in NYC.

For more details, check us out at https://axle.insure.

Why you should consider joining

• Trusted by Fortune 500 companies and top brands like Avis, Rocket Mortgage, and Experian - with more joining every month.
• Revenue growing 35% QoQ to mid-7-figures ARR, with best in class retention and growth continuing to accelerate.
• Backed by world-class investors: Y Combinator, Gradient (Google) and angels from Plaid and Cox Automotive.
• Join a tight-knit team where everyone drives real impact - top-tier customer and revenue metrics with half the team size of typical startups.
• Work on genuinely hard, unsolved problems at the intersection of agentic AI, complex data structuring, and financial risk.
• Competitive compensation and equity, full benefits, unlimited time-off, and an annual team offsite.

We're a lean team, and our customer base is growing too fast for us to keep up. We're looking for talented team members to join our early team and execute on an ambitious roadmap.

What You’ll Do

As a Forward Deployed Product Manager at Axle, you’ll drive product strategy for Axle's core enterprise customers. As AI has evolved, it's become critically important for product managers to spend more of their time with customers as the line between client product and our products blur. You’ll be in the room - running design sessions with enterprise clients, to better understand their people, process, and technology in order to translate real-world workflow requirements into external and internal product decisions, acting as the authoritative voice of the customer internally and externally.

Where our Technical Account Managers own the day-to-day client relationship, you own the shared product design and then take what you and the rest of our client-facing teams learn in the field, synthesize it into a coherent strategy, and partner with Product & Engineering to build the right solutions in the right order.

You’ll travel to meet enterprise clients, facilitate design sessions to understand how they work and where Axle fits, and use those insights to ensure successful agent adoption and shape what we build next. The decisions you make in this role will directly determine how fast Axle can scale.

Lead Design Sessions & Client Discovery

• Own and facilitate design sessions with enterprise clients - running structured conversations to deeply understand their own product, workflows, and customers better than they do
• Define how Axle will fit into each client’s product, technology stack, and operational processes - documenting the design decisions across people, process, and technology required to bring those solutions to life.
• Travel to client sites approximately once a month to build relationships, lead in-person design and discovery sessions, and reinforce trust at the executive and operator level.
• Partner with Technical Account Managers and Deployment Strategist post-session to ensure what was designed in the room is executable in the field.
• Develop a library of design patterns, solution architectures, and client workflow documentation that accelerates future implementations.

Act as the Voice of the Customer

• Deeply understand the needs of Axle’s clients through direct engagement, research, usage data, and collaboration with Technical Account Management and Deployment Strategy.
• Translate client feedback and real-world friction into clearly scoped product requirements that Product & Engineering can execute against without ambiguity.
• Balance qualitative feedback and product intuition with quantitative success metrics - adoption, integration health, time-to-value, and feature utilization to drive high-quality decisions.

Build the Forward Deployed Product Foundation

• Maintain and evolve Axle’s product documentation, solution design resources, and API guides for both internal teams and external developers.
• Grow into a trusted internal authority on Axle’s product capabilities, limitations, and roadmap - the person Sales, CS, and Engineering all rely on to understand what’s possible.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of experience in Product Management, Solutions Engineering with a product focus, Technical Product Management, or other customer-facing roles.
• Proven experience leading design sessions or discovery workshops with enterprise clients - you’re comfortable owning the room, asking hard questions, and driving to clarity.
• Strong technical fluency: solid understanding of AI agents, RESTful APIs, webhooks, and system integrations. You don’t need to write production code, but you need to speak confidently with engineers and clients about how things work under the hood.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication — able to translate complex technical concepts into clear narratives and tradeoffs for technical and non-technical audiences alike.
• A track record of making smart, defensible prioritization decisions that balance competing stakeholder needs, business impact, and technical feasibility.
• Sharp product intuition — you can walk out of a client design session and immediately know what matters, what doesn’t, and what needs to be built.
• Founder mindset: simplify, move fast, and embrace feedback. You thrive in fast-moving, ambiguous environments and enjoy building 0→1 products.
• An insatiable curiosity - always asking why, digging deep into how things work, and looking for the non-obvious solution.
• A humble, collaborative attitude and the willingness to do whatever it takes to move the product and the company forward.

What would be even better

• 7+ years of experience in Product Management, Solutions Engineering with a product focus, Technical Product Management, or other customer-facing roles.
• Experience at a fintech, infrastructure, or API-first company — especially in insurance, automotive, lending, or related industries.
• Background in B2B SaaS with enterprise clients in workflow-heavy, change-resistant industries.
• Working knowledge of SQL or a scripting language (Node/JavaScript, Python) — enough to query data and build lightweight tools to support your own work.
• Familiarity with AI in your day-to-day product work — prototyping, research, analysis — or with agentic AI workflows and LLM-powered products.
• Previous experience at an early-stage startup where you’ve had to build product process from zero.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Axle

Axle is an equal opportunity workplace—we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. We believe in actively building a team rich in diverse backgrounds, experiences, and opinions to better allow our employees, products, and community to thrive.