Director of Product, Conversational AI

About the Role

Every decade or so, a new communication medium reshapes how consumer companies meet their customers. Email rewrote direct response. SMS collapsed the distance between brand and human. Conversational AI is the next medium — and the companies that win it will be the ones that shape its native voice early, not the ones that paste the old playbook into a new pipe.

We are standing up the Conversational AI function at Ethos to do exactly that, for one of the most personal and emotionally loaded purchases a family ever makes: life insurance. You will be the single-threaded owner of Conversational AI at Ethos. You will not just "manage a roadmap." You will define what an AI-led conversation sounds like in regulated financial services and build the playbook for it. If you have ever wanted to be early to a medium the way the best lifecycle leaders were early to email or SMS, this is that moment.

Duties and Responsibilities:

Shape the Medium

• Narrative Architecture: Define what an Ethos AI conversation actually sounds like — the tone, the cadence, the openings, the objection handling, the moments of empathy. You own the editorial sensibility for every word the bot says.
• Channel Strategy: Decide where conversational AI fits inside the broader customer journey across call, text, email, and human agent. You will not let it become a siloed experiment.
• Cross-Medium Continuity: Own the product experience where a conversation can start as a call, continue as a text, and hand off to a human — without the customer ever feeling the seams.

Own the Conversational AI Roadmap

• Vision & Strategy: Own the multi-year vision for how Ethos talks to customers — across voice and text, across inbound and outbound, across every product line. You will publish and defend this roadmap with leadership and engineering.
• Opportunity Sequencing: Decide which customer segments, products, and call types we attack next, backed by unit economics. You will partner with Strategy & Ops to size each bet and defend the sequencing.
• Build vs. Buy vs. Partner: Own the calls on where we differentiate versus where we commoditize across the stack. Protect engineering time for the work that creates durable advantage.

Ship the Platform, Segment by Segment

• Segment-by-Segment Launches: Drive end-to-end launches across our customer segments — ANA, Win-Back, Pre-Approved, Choice, Whole Life — including script design, guardrails, QA, compliance sign-off, and gradual traffic ramp.
• Conversational Craft: Obsess over the moments that make or break a conversation — the first three seconds, the silence, the barge-in, the warmth in the voice, the smooth transition from bot to human. This is product craft expressed in dialogue.
• Seamless Handoff: Design the moment where the AI passes the customer to a human agent — with full context, full transcript, and zero repeat-yourself friction. This is where most voice AI products die; you will not let it die here.

Evaluation, Quality, and the Feedback Loop

• Eval Infrastructure: Own our evaluation strategy end-to-end. Define the quality rubric — conversion, compliance, empathy, "would I let this talk to my mom" — and make sure every prompt or model change is gated on regression tests.
• Conversational Intelligence: Partner with Data & Analytics to evaluate AI and human conversations on the same rubric. The bot earns the right to take traffic from humans only when we can honestly benchmark against them, week over week.
• Weekly Iteration Cadence: Sample, analyze, hypothesize, A/B test, ship, measure. The bot gets measurably better every week or we have a problem.

Regulatory, Compliance, and AI Governance

• Expanding the Envelope: Partner with Legal & Compliance to responsibly expand what the AI can do over time. This is one of the biggest unlocks for the business.
• AI Governance: Stand up the governance process — disclosure standards, recording and retention, state-by-state compliance, model documentation, escalation paths for incidents. Build this so it doesn't exist as a blocker later.
• External Counsel & Regulators: Be the product voice in conversations with external counsel and regulators. You will be expected to explain the stack to a non-technical lawyer and to a state insurance commissioner.

Cross-Functional Orchestration

• Engineering: You will not be a PM who writes tickets and disappears. You will sit with the team, read the code, understand the call flow, and make architectural tradeoffs in real time.
• Sales & Ops: You will spend time on the sales floor, listen to calls (both AI and human), and earn the trust that lets us take traffic from human agents.
• Marketing & Lifecycle: You will coordinate with the Re-Engagement and Lifecycle teams so conversational AI is one channel in a unified customer journey, not a siloed experiment.

Qualifications and Skills: 

• 8+ Years of Product Management, with meaningful experience working within customer-facing communication channels — email, SMS, push, in-app messaging, voice, or chat. Owning a channel directly as part of a larger product initiative is strongly preferred. Director-level candidates should have led PM teams or complex cross-functional orgs; Principal-level candidates should have a track record of owning category-defining products end-to-end.
• Medium-Native Instincts: You have shaped how a brand or product showed up in a new channel before. You understand that a new medium is never just the old message in a new pipe — it has its own rhythm, its own conventions, its own editorial voice. You can argue convincingly about why a 2018 SMS had to feel different from a 2012 email, and you have the receipts.
• Narrative & Copy Chops: You can write — and you have strong opinions about how copy should land. You can hear a 30-second AI bot opener and tell us exactly what is wrong with it.
• Commercial Acumen: You think in CAC, LTV, Payback, Contribution Margin. You can look at a business case and instantly interrogate whether the assumptions are real or fantasy.
• LLM-Native Product Instincts: You have shipped products built on frontier LLMs, or you can credibly show that you will pick this up fast. You know how to write production prompts, how to evaluate them, and how to stop them from drifting.
• "Founder" Energy: You have built something from 0 → 1. You prefer shipping rough and iterating over polishing in the dark. You are allergic to committees.

#LI-Remote  #LI-MB1

The US national base salary range for this full-time position is $184,000 - $324,000. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. 

Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only and do not include applicable bonus, equity, or benefits. 

You can find further details of our US benefits at https://www.ethoslife.com/careers/