About WorldQuant Learning
WorldQuant Learning (WQL) is building Keystone, an intelligent curriculum platform. We work with universities and continuing education divisions to help them leverage AI to maximize their greatest asset - curriculum. WQL is looking for people who want to build something exciting and impactful at the intersection of education and AI.
Keystone is the intelligent curriculum platform that connects how institutions build, maintain, and evolve curriculum, so learning endures.
Curriculum is the connective tissue of higher education — and at most institutions it lives in static documents, siloed systems, and the heads of faculty. WorldQuant Learning is changing that. With Keystone, universities can design programs, keep them aligned to a fast-moving world, and continuously improve them with intelligence built into the platform itself. The result is curriculum that is coherent, current, and durable — and learning that endures well beyond any single course.
We are at an inflection point: a differentiated product, early institutional traction, and a clear runway to grow Keystone into a category-defining platform in higher education. This is a ground-floor opportunity to help shape how we sell, who we sell to, and how we win.
The Role
We are hiring a Principal Product Manager to be Keystone's first full-time product leader. You will define what the platform becomes, translating deep partner insight, market discovery, and competitive judgment into what our engineering organization builds next. You will report to and work in direct partnership with our CTO, who owns the engineering relationship, the technical architecture of the platform, and the overall product vision.
Keystone's engineering delivery runs through Tapforce, a high-functioning outsourced development partner with an embedded Product Owner/Scrum Master who owns backlog execution and sprint ceremonies. You are not here to run sprints. You are here to own the upstream work that determines what is worth building, and to be the product authority in every room where that question gets answered, from partner discovery calls to roadmap planning sessions with the CTO.
This is a senior individual contributor role with real scope and real exposure. The playbook is being written in real time, and you will help write it. If you want to join a team that ships with high velocity, holds itself to a high standard of product thinking, and is building something genuinely differentiated in an industry that has been underserved by great software, this is that seat.
What You'll Do
- Own the product roadmap. Work directly with the CTO to sequence priorities and set direction across the platform. Bring evidence to every roadmap decision: partner interviews, competitive observation, and the market signal you are actively collecting. Defend build-vs-defer calls against feature pressure with clear reasoning grounded in what you have actually heard, not what seems logical from the inside.
- Lead discovery that informs the roadmap. Conduct ongoing interviews and working sessions with program directors, instructional designers, VPs of Academic Affairs, and faculty across current and prospective partner institutions. Build and maintain a live read on what each institution is actually trying to accomplish, what is blocking them, and how they define success before any scope goes to engineering. The roadmap is an output of this work, not an input to it.
- Support Customer Success and manage feedback loops. Partner with Customer Success to run intake, onboarding, feedback collection, and close-loop communication with adopting institutions. Set up each partner with a defined use case and measurable success criteria before they touch the platform. Triage what you learn into roadmap inputs, and communicate back to partners on what you heard, what you are doing about it, and why.
- Show up as the product expert in sales and partner conversations. Join prospect meetings, onboarding sessions, and partner reviews as an active participant, not a support function. Ask the questions that surface what institutions are actually trying to solve: budget pressure, curriculum refresh backlogs, micro-credential strategy, accreditation cycles. What you observe and hear in these conversations is source material for the roadmap.
- Set and hold the product positioning standard. Decide how Keystone is described across product copy, sales materials, and partner-facing communication, and keep it consistent. Translate what the platform does into the language that presidents, provosts, instructional designers, and IT leaders actually use to make purchase decisions. When the messaging drifts, pull it back.
- Keep the product story ready for sales. Partner with the GTM team on demos, collateral, and competitive positioning. Skills functionality, content update workflows, authentic assessment, and course import surface in prospect conversations regularly. The product narrative around each needs to be clear and ready before the ask arrives. Your job is to stay ahead of those conversations, not respond to them.
- Own Keystone's accessibility compliance roadmap. Track ADA Title II and WCAG 2.1 AA obligations specific to a third-party platform delivered inside institutional LMS environments. Convert those obligations into concrete product requirements with clear ownership and timelines. Accreditors and institutional IT buyers will ask about this. Be ahead of the question, not catching up to it.
- Keep the team connected to the market. Maintain a current picture of how the competitive landscape is shifting across higher education, professional credentialing, and corporate L&D. Bring what you learn into roadmap decisions, positioning conversations, and leadership planning. The market signal you carry should change how WQL makes decisions, not just populate a slide.
What We're Looking For
- 8+ years in B2B SaaS product management, with meaningful time in Higher Education, K-12, or Professional/Corporate Learning. You do not need a glossary for LMS, accreditation cycles, instructional design, or LTI. You understand why a Provost and a Director of Instructional Design have different definitions of done, and how to earn trust with both.
- A genuine practitioner of discovery. You run customer interviews the way other PMs run sprints: on a regular cadence, with structured intent, and with direct output that shapes what gets built. You can distinguish a feature request from a job to be done, and you reframe the former into the latter before scope gets written.
- Experienced working with any engineering team. You know how to calibrate to what a team needs from product and what slows them down. You are adept at defining the clear job to be done: who is struggling with what, what success looks like, and what is explicitly out of scope for this iteration.
- Direct, partner-facing experience at the institutional level. You are experienced and comfortable engaging with program, institution and academic leaders to understand their needs.
- A leader in developing customer feedback loops. Experience building or formalizing a customer feedback program from informal early-stage practices into something that scales.
- Comfortable being the product function. This is a senior IC role. You set your own bar, hold your own accountability, and define what good looks like before anyone else asks.
- Strong written and verbal communication. Institutional buyers are smart, busy, and skeptical of vendor claims. You can hold their attention, sharpen an argument under pressure, and say something clear in fewer words than you started with.
- Mission alignment. You believe that great curriculum architecture produces better learning outcomes, and that software can make the work of building and maintaining curriculum meaningfully better for the people who do it. Keystone is not a product you can advocate for well without believing in it.
Nice to Have
- Experience with AI-native or AI-augmented product lines, particularly where "AI suggests, instructor decides" is a trust principle you have had to design for, not just assert.
- Familiarity with curriculum design frameworks, Bloom's Taxonomy, or learning outcomes architecture, enough to hold a substantive conversation with curriculum owners and developers.
- Fluency with WCAG, InfoSec standards in a SaaS vendor context, including the boundary between third-party platform obligation and institutional obligation.
- Prior experience at an early-stage startup where you saw a product motion get built, or rebuilt, from the ground up.
How to Apply
WorldQuant Learning is a total compensation organization where you will be eligible for a base salary, performance bonus, and benefits. To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on job function and level, benchmarked against similar stage organizations. When finalizing an offer, we will take into consideration an individual’s experience level and the qualifications they bring to the role to formulate a competitive total compensation package.
At WorldQuant Learning, we are committed to providing candidates with all necessary information in compliance with pay transparency laws. If you believe any required details are missing from this job posting, please notify us at careers@wqlearning.com, and we will address your concerns promptly.
