Opportunity

Principal PM – Agentic AI Voice at Hopper (Pre-IPO) in Columbus

Location Columbus
Company Hopper
Source jobicy
Posted 2026-10-20 04:15:08

Career & Market Insight

This is a high-autonomy, high-impact Principal PM role at a pre-IPO travel fintech unicorn that has raised $750M+ and commands 75%+ of revenue from B2B enterprise contracts. It sits at the intersection of three of the hottest areas in tech right now: agentic AI, conversational voice interfaces, and travel fintech.

Compensation signals: Salary is undisclosed but described as "competitive" with pre-IPO equity — at the Principal PM level, expect $170K–$230K+ base at comparable companies, with meaningful equity upside if Hopper IPOs. The equity angle is a key variable to probe in interviews.

Skills you'll develop:

  • Voice AI product ownership (ASR/TTS, latency, barge-in) — a niche, rapidly growing skillset with few experienced practitioners
  • LLM-based agent behavior design and prompt engineering at production scale
  • Enterprise B2B product management with regulated-industry clients
  • Figma-level design execution and AI-assisted prototyping

Green flags: Small, dynamic teams with real ownership; direct access to management; exposure to global enterprise partners (Capital One, Air Canada, Nubank). The design-leaning scope is unusual and valuable for differentiation.

Watch for: The role requires a rare combination of voice AI depth, design fluency, and enterprise partner management. Candidates without direct voice product experience will be screened out. This is a highly specialized role suited to PMs ready to own a vertical deeply rather than climb a traditional PM ladder.

About the Role

HTS Assist is Hopper's agentic AI assistant for travel, resolving real customer issues like flight changes, cancellations, refunds, and bookings over chat and voice for some of the largest travel brands and enterprises in the world. Voice carries its own product problems, from latency and turn-taking to escalation timing when a human is on the line, and this role owns both surfaces with equal depth.

As Principal Product Manager, you will own the customer-facing agent end to end: the conversations, the interface, and the experience our partners put in front of millions of travelers. This is a deliberately design-leaning role, and you will be the day-to-day design decision-maker, shaping flows and interfaces directly in close partnership with partner design teams and our in-house designer.

What Would Your Day-to-Day Look Like

  • Own the roadmap for the customer-facing conversational agent across chat and voice, from intent coverage and conversation design to the interfaces partners embed in their apps and websites
  • Set the product bar for voice specifically, covering latency, turn-taking, barge-in handling, localization, realtime voice and ASR/TTS quality, since a caller's tolerance for a bad interaction is lower than a chat user's
  • Engage enterprise partners through discovery, requirement shaping, and launch decisions, translating partner asks into product choices that keep one product serving many partners
  • Partner with Partner Solutions on implementation and onboarding
  • Drive design daily, working hands-on in Figma to produce flows and wireframes, and partner with design on high-fidelity and production assets
  • Build working prototypes using AI coding tools where they beat a written spec, to test conversation flows and interface ideas
  • Define and defend quality bars with the evaluation team, covering resolution rate, containment, escalation correctness, and conversation quality across both chat and voice
  • Specify agent behavior in detail, including resolution, tone, escalation policy, guardrails, and edge cases, and iterate from production conversation data
  • Stay close to GTM, Partner Solutions, and Success teams, feeding what the field learns back into the roadmap

An Ideal Candidate Has

  • 8+ years of product management experience, including principal or lead-level ownership of a customer-facing product, with direct experience shipping voice-based conversational products such as IVR, voice bots, or contact center voice automation
  • Hands-on ownership of a production voice product, not only chat or text-based conversational AI, with working knowledge of ASR/TTS tradeoffs, latency budgets, and turn-taking or barge-in design. This is a required skillset
  • Design fluency, comfortable manipulating design files and producing flows and basic mocks solo in Figma, having operated as a de facto design lead on a lean team
  • The ability to write enough code to get a prototype working without waiting on an engineer, treating AI tools as a normal part of how they build
  • Hands-on front-end experience, having built or shipped web front ends and able to engage engineers credibly
  • Deep partner-facing experience with enterprise clients, ideally in regulated industries, shaping requirements and launch decisions at the product level
  • A data-driven approach grounded in customer service and automation metrics, including resolution, containment, CSAT, and escalation quality
  • Working familiarity with LLM-based products, including prompt and behavior design, AI quality practices, and their failure modes

Perks and Benefits of Working With Us

  • Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary, upsides of pre-IPO equity packages
  • Hopper covers the cost of employee premiums for private medical and dental coverage
  • Hopper also offers private life and accident coverage
  • Please ask us about our very generous parental leave, much above industry standards
  • Access to co-working space on demand through FlexDesk and a work-from-home stipend
  • Unlimited PTO
  • Hopper offers a monthly cash allowance for gym memberships and to cover home office expenses
  • Carrot Cash travel stipend
  • Entrepreneurial culture where pushing limits and taking risks is everyday business
  • Open communication with management and company leadership
  • Small, dynamic teams with massive impact

About Hopper
At Hopper, we are on a mission to become the leading travel platform globally, powering Hopper's mobile app, website and our B2B business, HTS (Hopper Technology Solutions). By leveraging massive amounts of data and advanced machine learning algorithms, Hopper combines its world-class travel agency offering with proprietary fintech products to bring transparency, flexibility and savings to travelers globally. We have developed several unique fintech solutions that address everything from pricing volatility to trip disruptions, helping people travel better and save more on their trips.

The Hopper platform serves hundreds of millions of travelers globally and continues to capture market share around the world. The Hopper app has been downloaded over 120 million times and has become largely popular among younger travelers, with 70% of its users being Gen Z and millennials.

While many know us as the Gen Z and Millennial travel app, Hopper has evolved to become much more than that. In recent years, we've grown into a travel fintech provider, commerce platform, and global travel agency that powers some of the world's largest brands.

Through HTS, our B2B division, the company supercharges its partners' direct channels by integrating our fintech products on their sites or powering end-to-end travel portals. Today, our partners include leading travel brands like Capital One, Nubank, Air Canada, and many more.

Hopper has been named the #1 most innovative company in travel by Fast Company. The Hopper app has been downloaded over 120 million times and Hopper is now the #3 largest online travel agency in North America. Hopper has raised over $750 million USD of private capital and is backed by some of the largest institutional investors and banks in the world.

Come take off with us!

This role utilizes automated decision-making systems to assess candidate suitability. Under local regulations, you have the right to understand the principal factors used in this assessment, request a correction of your data, or request a human review of any automated decision. To exercise these rights, please contact [email protected].

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this Principal PM role fully remote?
Yes, the posting is tagged #LI-Remote. Hopper also provides FlexDesk coworking access on demand and a work-from-home stipend, supporting fully distributed work arrangements.
Is voice product experience truly required, or can strong chat AI experience substitute?
Voice product experience is explicitly listed as a required skillset, not a nice-to-have. The posting specifically underlines that hands-on ownership of a production voice product — including ASR/TTS tradeoffs and barge-in design — is non-negotiable.
What is the salary range for this role?
The posting does not disclose a specific salary range but describes compensation as competitive, with a pre-IPO equity package included as an additional upside.
What enterprise partners will I work with in this role?
Hopper's HTS partners include major brands such as Capital One, Air Canada, Nubank, Uber, CommBank, and Flair Airlines — all large-scale, enterprise-level clients.
Does this role require design skills in addition to traditional PM skills?
Yes, this is described as a "deliberately design-leaning role." Candidates should be comfortable working hands-on in Figma to produce flows and wireframes independently, effectively acting as a design lead on a lean team.
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