Principal Product Manager

Your Impact

The product decisions you make will determine whether millions of Americans can access college. You’ll shape the future of studentaid.gov — the system that processes $120 billion in federal aid each year.

The Product Challenge

You’ll own product strategy and execution for systems that handle:

• Over 10M applications in a 6-month window with brutal traffic spikes and unforgiving deadlines
• Complex workflows serving students, parents, and financial aid administrators
• Policy requirements that change constantly but must be implemented perfectly
• Accessibility standards that aren’t optional — mistakes prevent real students from accessing aid
• Stakeholder alignment across engineering, design, policy, legal, and multiple federal agencies

What You’ll Do

This is a hands-on product leadership role — you’ll work directly with users, write specs, make hard trade-off decisions, and unblock teams to ship faster. The specific methodology doesn’t matter — we need product managers who can ship what users actually need. Tasks may include:

• Own product roadmap for critical FAFSA features used by millions of families
• Turn vague policy requirements into clear specs engineering can execute
• Make prioritization decisions that determine what ships and what waits
• Conduct user research to understand where families struggle and why
• Align stakeholders across engineering, policy, legal, and leadership
• Remove blockers preventing teams from shipping

Who Succeeds Here

We’re looking for product managers who’ve shipped at scale and led without authority — typically a strong PM at a top tech company or product leader at a high-growth startup, with experience in most of the following:

You won’t have direct reports, but you’ll advocate for users while steering cross-functional, cross-agency teams with engineering, policy, comms, contractor partners, and legal in the mix to solve the hardest problems.

• Owned product strategy and shipped features for systems serving millions of users
• Led cross-functional teams through ambiguous, complex product problems
• Made hard trade-off decisions balancing user needs, business constraints, and technical feasibility
• Conducted user research that fundamentally changed what teams built
• Written product specs that engineering teams could actually execute

Reality Check

Compensation: This is a GS-15 position — the highest rung on the standard government pay scale and roughly equivalent to a Staff or Principal PM at a top technology company. Full federal benefits included.

The Environment: You’ll face legacy systems, federal compliance, and change-resistant stakeholders. However, you own your product decisions — shaping roadmaps, influencing requirements, and driving change through consensus rather than permission.

The Impact: Your products will impact more families than most consumer apps ever reach at one of the most consequential financial moments of their lives. Once you’re in, you have product autonomy rarely seen in government.

Interview Process

Our interview process is fully remote, consisting of 3-5 conversations that assess work experience, fit, and technical skills.