Instrumental
Lead AI Product Manager
$174-298K base + equity•Palo Alto, CA (in office Mon, Wed, Fri)
Company
The Opportunity
About Us
Instrumental builds AI for the factories that make complex electronics. Cameras over each assembly station capture every unit at every key step, and Instrumental's AI reads those images alongside test results and production data. It catches a bent pin or a connector that isn't fully seated while the unit is still on the line, spots defects nobody has seen before, and helps engineers trace a failure back to its cause.
Manufacturing has become one of the biggest constraints on scaling AI infrastructure. A single NVIDIA GB300 rack holds more than 30 trays, each packed with dense circuit boards and hundreds of connectors, and much of it is still assembled by hand. Instrumental runs across NVIDIA's global manufacturing network, and its models are shared between factories, so a new site building the same product catches the same defects on its first day. Instrumental's customers make up 80% of the AI infrastructure market.
Instrumental and NVIDIA are now working to share the training data for the GB200 and GB300 racks with the partners who build on NVIDIA's designs. The goal is to become a standard for how AI infrastructure gets assembled.
Highlights
Backed by NVIDIA
NVIDIA invested in Instrumental in 2026 through NVentures, its venture arm. It is also a customer: NVIDIA uses Instrumental to speed up final tray and rack assembly by up to 14 days.
World-Class Customers
Meta uses Instrumental on its Reality Labs hardware, including Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Bose, Cisco Meraki, and Toast use it to catch defects before they reach customers.
Agentic AI on the Factory Floor
On the factory floor, Instrumental's AI agents read images, test results, and production data together to find why a defect happened, and they learn over time so every engineer can solve problems like the best one on the line.
An AI-Native Product Team
Instrumental's product team builds with AI agents and believes project management belongs in engineering. Product managers spend their time with customers and on deciding what to build.
Founded by Apple Engineers
The founders were product design engineers on the iPod and the first Apple Watch and spent long stretches on the factory lines in China that built them.
Team
Co-Founder & CEO (Hiring Manager)
Stanford mechanical engineering. Ex-Apple product design lead for the first Apple Watch, and iPod product design engineer before that.
Co-Founder & CTO
MIT and Stanford. Ex-Apple product design engineer and founding member of the Apple Watch Taptic Engine team.
VP of Engineering
Ex-VP of Engineering at Exabeam, Socure, and Ketch. Helped build Aerohive's cloud platform from the ground up through its IPO. PhD, University of Iowa.
Candidate
Is This You?
You spend real time with customers every week, and your calendar proves it: site visits, days embedded with customer teams, and evening calls with customers in other time zones. You've learned a technical domain by working closely with the engineers who live in it. You prototype with AI, and your judgment decides what ships.
Your Mission
Grow one of Instrumental's products to 10x its revenue. Customers buy it today to solve one narrow problem. The platform can handle many more, and these companies run manufacturing at enormous scale. Your job is to find where else Instrumental can help them, on their factory floors, and build it with Instrumental's engineers on the new agentic platform.
What you'll get to do
- Live in the Field: You spend about 20% of your time with customers, at factories a short drive from Palo Alto and at sites in Taiwan, Malaysia, and Guadalajara.
- Decide What to Build: You work with customers and Instrumental's customer-facing teams to write an opinionated roadmap for your use case: what to keep, what to kill, what to change, and what to build new.
- Prototype and Field-Test: You prototype with AI, run trials on real production lines, and ship improvements while the learning is fresh.
- Define Quality and Trust: You build evals with domain experts, check the AI's judgments against theirs, and design how engineers verify and correct what the product tells them.
- Shape the Product Org: Instrumental is building its product team from the ground up, hiring the people who do the work before the people who manage them, and you are one of the first. You report to Anna, the CEO, for now, and you have a say in what product leadership the team needs as it grows.
What we're looking for
- Customers Are Part of Your Week: You already spend 20% or more of your time with customers, every week.
- A Technical Domain, Learned Fast: You've earned the trust of technical users in a domain you had to learn, such as developer tools, robotics, security, energy, or industrial software.
- Startup Ownership: You have 5+ years in product or as a founder, mostly at startups, with real ownership of a product offering.
- Collaborative Judgment: You find the best ideas by working closely with the experts around you, and your track record shows those calls were right most of the time.
- Storytelling That Sells: You turn a pile of customer inputs into a story that gets customers, internal users, and stakeholders behind a plan.
- Data Fluency: You're comfortable digging through complex customer datasets with spreadsheets, basic statistics, and SQL.
- AI Curiosity: You're actively changing how you work with AI tools, and you want a team that pushes you further.
Bonus Points
- Hardware or Manufacturing: You've worked on hardware, manufacturing, or industrial products.
- Built for Engineers: Your users have been engineers solving hard technical problems.
Interview
What to Expect
Intro Call
Hiring Manager Call
Details
The Fine Print
- Compensation: $174-298K base depending on level, plus equity
- Reports To: Anna-Katrina Shedletsky, Co-Founder & CEO
- Location: In the Palo Alto office three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). You spend about 20% of your time with customers, at Bay Area customer sites and with customer teams abroad.
- Work Authorization: Transfer only. Instrumental can transfer an existing visa but cannot sponsor new work authorization.
Next Steps
Interested?
Schedule a confidential conversation with Product Scout.