Senior/Staff Product Manager, Technical (ACF)

About Skylight

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services.

We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today's digital world.

If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists.

The work we do matters.

About the job

At Skylight, product managers are responsible for strategy, planning, execution, stakeholder management, and team health. Product managers partner with researchers, designers, engineers, client stakeholders, and others to inform their product decisions. At a high level, it’s the product manager’s job to figure out what to build next and why.

A technical product manager specializes in products with significant technical depth — platforms, APIs, data systems, or modernization efforts — where product decisions depend on fluency with the underlying architecture and engineering tradeoffs.

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) is expanding surge support and capacity for its new Data Capacity and Digital Services organization within the Office of Administration, through the option year of our Task Order 1 contract. The team works with enterprise-serving organizations like ACF Tech and the Office of Grants Management to help programs deliver on ACF’s mission, including priorities focused on reducing grantee burden; reducing waste, fraud, and abuse; and modernizing legacy systems.

You’ll lead product work that spans rapid-turnaround surge requests and signature modernization efforts, working directly with ACF staff to decide what’s worth building and why. Much of this work sits on top of platforms like Palantir Foundry, Databricks, and enterprise AI tools, so you’ll need technical fluency to weigh architecture and data tradeoffs alongside your engineers.

What to know going in

This work calls for a consultant’s skill set: you’ll interface directly with senior leaders, and much of the work isn’t scoped in advance. This isn’t a team where you simply prioritize existing work in a backlog. You’ll need a working understanding of service design and fluency to engage with AI-forward delivery teams, including data scientists, Foundry engineers designers and others.

Alongside delivery, we do a lot of technical consulting and capacity building, so people who take initiative and are comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity tend to do best here.

What you’ll do

• Lead a cross-functional team of researchers, designers, engineers, and subject matter experts to build and ship high-impact products and services
• Shape loosely defined, unscoped problems into a clear product strategy, including vision, objectives, measures of success, roadmap, and backlog
• Translate policy and program requirements from ACF leadership into technical solutions the team can deliver, and keep plans current as priorities shift
• Write and prioritize user stories, build release plans, and facilitate team ceremonies such as planning, stakeholder syncs, and retrospectives
• Work in close partnership with government teams to help them build digital skills and product knowledge throughout the course of the project
• Creatively navigate bureaucratic challenges, paving the way for more intuitive processes in the future

What we’re looking for

• Basic qualifications
• Can develop a product strategy grounded in the problem to be solved, prioritizing outcomes over features, with a roadmap and clear success criteria
• Apply lean and agile principles (e.g., minimum viable product) to validate assumptions early, break scope into small chunks of value, maintain a prioritized backlog of validated user stories, and facilitate ceremonies on cross-functional teams (product, design, engineering, ops)
• Experience applying service design methods, such as journey mapping, service blueprinting, and contextual inquiry, to uncover pain points, manual workarounds, and opportunities to automate or streamline
• Hands-on experience delivering AI-enabled products or workflows, including judging where AI (e.g., LLMs, agents, intelligent document processing) adds value versus where simpler automation or process change is the better answer
• Understanding of how data moves through an organization, with the ability to spot fragmented or duplicated data and work with engineers to design more connected, reliable systems
• Technical fluency to reason through system architecture, APIs, data modeling, security, and engineering tradeoffs with engineers, and to make product calls that depend on them
• Ability to manage clients and stakeholders in a way that builds trust, alignment, and healthy environments for individuals and teams
• A track record of defining and measuring impact, such as time saved, reduced processing times, fewer errors, or increased adoption
• A mindset and work approach that aligns with our core values
• Nice-to-haves
• Hands-on experience with one or more of Credal, Palantir Foundry, Databricks, or Microsoft Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse)
• Experience delivering through AI-enablement with responsible AI practices, such as evaluating model outputs, designing human-in-the-loop review, and familiarity with frameworks like the NIST AI Risk Management Framework or federal AI guidance
• Familiarity with federal security and compliance processes, such as FedRAMP and Authority to Operate (ATO), and how they shape what tools can be adopted
• An engineering or data background, or experience taking a product from zero to one in a startup or other setting where you had to navigate uncertainty
• Experience translating policy into technical solutions and implementing it through software
• Experience modernizing legacy systems, including migrating data and workflows off spreadsheets, paper, or aging case management tools
• Experience delivering AI-forward technology in government, highly regulated industries, or other public-benefit settings
• A track record of staying aligned and accountable on remote teams
• Don’t meet every qualification but think you can do the job? We’d still love to hear from you. If you’re excited about the role, apply. We consider candidates with a range of backgrounds and experiences.
• Other requirements
• Some of our available roles are on federal contracts that require a degree or additional years of experience as a substitute.
• All work must be conducted within the U.S., excluding U.S. territories.
• You must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. now and in the future without sponsorship.
• An existing clearance isn’t required to apply, but as a government contractor, anyone hired into this role must be able to obtain a Tier 2 public trust background investigation.
• You must complete a company background check successfully.

Logistics

Position type

This is a full-time, exempt position.

Location

This is a fully remote position.

Travel

This role may require travel one to two times a year based on client or contract needs.

Care package