Founding Head of Product, New Ventures

Our Mission and Opportunity

Early education is one of the most important determinants of childhood outcomes, a critical support for working families, and a $175B market that remains underserved by modern technology. Brightwheel is the largest, fastest growing, and most loved platform in early ed, trusted by millions of educators and families every day. We are a three-time Cloud 100 company https://www.forbes.com/lists/cloud100/a, backed by top investors including Addition, Bessemer, Emerson Collective, Lowercase Capital, Notable Capital, and Mark Cuban.

Our Team

Our team is passionate, talented, and customer-focused. We embody our Leadership Principles https://mybrightwheel.com/about/ in our work and culture. We are a distributed team with remote employees across every US time zone, as well as select offices in the US and internationally.

Who You Are

You are an AI-native product leader and builder who combines world-class product taste, deep customer empathy, and high standards with the drive to start something new. You create clarity in ambiguous spaces, turn a blank page into a real business, and lead by example in how modern products get built. You care deeply about the experience you put in front of families and educators, and you move with the urgency and ownership of a founder.

You will succeed in this role if you are:

• Focused on customer and business impact. You care about creating real value for families and educators, and about proving a business that can grow into something meaningful for brightwheel.

• A practitioner-builder. You do not lead from a distance. You use AI and modern tooling in your own work to build, prototype, and learn, and to show what great looks like.

What You'll Do

brightwheel sits at the center of early education, trusted by tens of thousands of schools and millions of families. That trust, our distribution, and a profitable core are a foundation most new ventures never get to start with. The opportunity now is to build what comes next: new products alongside our core platform, new markets and customer segments, and entirely new businesses that serve families and educators in ways we have not reached yet.

You will lead that work. You will take new ventures from the first idea to product-market fit and beyond, building with your own hands and with AI, and proving both the product and the business behind it.

In this role, you will:

• Start and own new ventures end to end, from the first idea to product-market fit and into scale.

• Discover what customers truly need, build the first version, and get it in front of real people quickly.

• Prove the business behind each bet: the value to customers, the model, and the economics that make it worth growing.

• Build hands-on, using AI and modern tooling to prototype, learn, and raise what a small, focused team can accomplish.

• Work directly with our CEO and executive team, set the vision and drive outcomes visible at the Board level.

• Recruit, inspire, and grow the team around the ventures that take off.

What You've Done

We are open to a variety of backgrounds, but qualified candidates usually bring:

• A record of building products customers love. You have the product taste and judgment to know what to build and what to leave out, and the customer empathy to find real needs before the data exists.

• Experience taking something from 0 to 1. You have started or built something new, ideally to real traction, and ideally as a founder or early builder who wore every hat.

• Ownership of the whole business. You have carried the value, pricing, and economics that turn an idea into something worth scaling.

• Applied AI in your own work. You use AI and modern tooling to build and ship faster, and to go deeper across disciplines.

• Communication and presence. You can set a vision, align an executive team and board, and inspire the builders who join you.

What Sets You Apart

The candidates who will thrive in this role go beyond strong product management:

• You are a multidisciplinary builder. You move across product, design, engineering, and data, and you use AI to go deeper in each.

• You thrive in ambiguity. You make confident calls when there is no playbook and no data, and you follow the data the moment it exists.

• You think like an owner of the whole business, from the customer problem to the path to revenue, and you bring an executive team and a board along with a clear, compelling vision.

Brightwheel is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment and is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

Protecting Our Applicants: Please be aware of recruiting scams impersonating Brightwheel. All legitimate communications come from @mybrightwheel.com http://mybrightwheel.com addresses, and we never ask for payment or sensitive personal data as part of our hiring process. If you suspect fraudulent contact, reach out to security@mybrightwheel.com. Thank you for helping us keep our applicant community safe.