Senior AI PM at Hopper - Pricing & ML Systems Role in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
This is a high-impact, high-ceiling role for a Senior+ PM ready to own mission-critical infrastructure at a well-funded travel-tech unicorn. A few key signals worth evaluating:
Compensation & Structure: The Independent Contractor structure means no employee benefits (pension, health insurance, statutory leave). Market rates for a Senior+ AI PM of this caliber in Ireland or remotely typically range from €120k–€180k+ annually in equivalent day rates. The pre-IPO equity upside is a notable carrot — Hopper has raised $750M+ — but contractor equity arrangements warrant careful legal scrutiny.
Skills You'll Build:
- End-to-end AI/ML product ownership — one of the most in-demand PM specializations in 2024–2025.
- Hands-on LLM evaluation and model lifecycle management — cutting-edge and highly transferable.
- Marketplace pricing intelligence and financial reconciliation systems at scale — rare, senior-level expertise.
- Cross-functional leadership across Data Science, Engineering, and Finance in a global B2B context.
Culture Signals: Hopper presents as a growth-stage startup with startup energy (small dynamic teams, entrepreneurial culture, risk-taking) but enterprise scale ($1T+ market). The role is described as "foundational," meaning you'll have significant autonomy and direct business impact — a green flag for ambitious PMs.
Watch-outs: The contractor-only structure removes employment protections. Confirm equity vesting terms, IP ownership clauses, and notice periods before signing. The automated screening disclosure is standard but worth noting.
About the Role
We are seeking an exceptional, AI-native Senior+ Product Manager to build and lead the intelligence and reconciliation backbone of HTS across Flights, Hotels, Cars, and Ancillaries.
This role owns the systems that define pricing intelligence, supplier performance reporting, and financial truth across millions of travel transactions.
You will design and scale model-driven infrastructure that continuously interprets transactional data, generates reference pricing, detects performance shifts, reconciles financial flows, and governs revenue integrity in real time.
This is a foundational role at the intersection of marketplace economics, machine learning, and financial systems. You will partner deeply with Data Science and Engineering to productionize predictive models, define evaluation frameworks, manage model lifecycles, and ensure intelligence systems are measurable, adaptive, and trusted.
The work you do will directly shape partner economics, supplier transparency, and HTS's global commerce platform.
What your day-to-day would look like:
- Own the end-to-end strategy and roadmap for pricing intelligence, supplier performance intelligence, and financial reconciliation across all travel verticals.
- Architect and evolve reference pricing systems leveraging predictive modeling, elasticity signals, competitive benchmarking, and real-time anomaly detection.
- Build the supplier intelligence layer, transforming transactional data into automated performance signals, demand insights, and pricing diagnostics.
- Establish and govern the canonical source of truth for revenue, margin, take rate, transactions, and cancellations across systems and partners.
- Design model evaluation, monitoring, and feedback frameworks, including drift detection and continuous improvement mechanisms.
- Drive cross-functional execution across Engineering, Data Science, Finance, Commercial, and Supply to deliver production-grade, model-integrated infrastructure.
An ideal candidate has:
- 5+ years of Product Management experience, including ownership of AI-native products and model-driven systems in production. You have built and scaled systems where AI is foundational to product behavior — not an additive feature.
- Hands-on experience writing prompts, designing evaluation harnesses, or prototyping with LLMs/foundation models as part of their PM workflow (not just overseeing others doing it).
- Strong fluency working independently with SQL and large-scale transactional datasets.
- Demonstrated experience operating as an AI-native PM, with hands-on ownership of model lifecycle management including problem framing, signal design, evaluation metrics (e.g., precision/recall tradeoffs, forecasting accuracy), monitoring frameworks, drift detection, and retraining strategies.
- Experience shipping predictive systems, anomaly detection platforms, automated decisioning infrastructure, or model-driven pricing systems at scale.
- Experience owning pricing systems, financial reporting platforms, or marketplace intelligence tools.
- Deep understanding of marketplace economics, revenue mechanics, and pricing strategy.
- Track record of delivering complex, cross-functional systems with measurable business impact.
- Exceptional communicator able to operate effectively across technical and commercial stakeholders.
Bonus:
- Prior experience in Data Science, Engineering, or a highly technical role.
- Background in travel commerce, fintech, ads, or other transaction-heavy marketplace environments.
Perks and benefits of working with us:
- Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary and the upsides of pre-IPO equity packages.
- Carrot Cash travel stipend
- Flexdesk All Access Pass & Work-from-home stipend
- Entrepreneurial culture where pushing limits and taking risks is everyday business
- Open communication with management and company leadership
- Small, dynamic teams = massive impact
Engagement Status: Independent Contractor
Note on Contractual Status: This position is offered as an Independent Contractor engagement (Contract for Services) and does not constitute an offer of direct employment. The successful candidate will operate as a self-employed individual or through a Personal Service Company (PSC). You will be responsible for your own tax, PRSI, and VAT compliance in accordance with Irish Revenue Commissioners regulations. Engagement is contingent upon providing proof of valid business registration and appropriate professional indemnity insurance.
More 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.
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.
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 raised over $750 million USD of private capital and is backed by some of the largest institutional investors and banks in the world. Hopper has been named the #1 most innovative company in travel by Fast Company, is the #3 largest online travel agency in North America, and 70% of app customers are Gen Z and millennial travelers.
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
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