Product Manager, Optimizer - Timely

Who We Are

School scheduling is a hard problem, one that technology was meant to solve. Yet for decades, the master schedule has been built by hand, consuming educators’ valuable time while delivering a sub-optimal result for students. We started Timely to build the tool we wish we had when we were in schools. Today, we are changing how schools create high-quality schedules for teachers and students.

Timely combines groundbreaking AI technology with support from a team of expert school schedulers: saving schedulers’ time and surfacing opportunities for leaders to unlock staff potential. Timely delivers optimized master schedules that are more efficient, accommodate diverse educator needs, and enable student access to courses and pathways that impact their lives.

We serve districts and charter school organizations across 20+ states, growing and renewing at industry-leading rates driven by strong product-market fit, a deep understanding of education, and a commitment to customer success.

About the Role

This role is for an experienced product manager comfortable operating at the intersection of algorithmic systems and customer problems. You will work on a product squad alongside the engineers who build and tune the optimizer. You will own the strategy that brings users from their constraints to optimized schedules, defining the optimization process and experience, validating improvements with customers, and using a blend of AI and UI to ensure complex problem-solving is expressed simply.

This role balances technical collaboration with product judgment—deciding which optimizer enhancements are worth pursuing, measuring their effectiveness, and designing the surrounding experience so schedulers understand what the optimizer is doing and why.

Responsibilities

• Engage with customers to understand opportunities to generate better K-12 school schedules.
• Dive deep into optimizer technology and the scheduling domain to facilitate and drive critical engineering decisions with accountability.
• Partner with Engineering to surface and refine improvements to core algorithms, model-builders, and orchestration pipelines to meet user needs.
• Design and execute experiments that test optimizer changes, defining consistent performance and quality metrics (feasibility rate, schedule quality scores, solve time, constraint violations).
• Craft optimizer product requirements, defining new product features built on advanced computational capabilities and collaborating with engineering (and AI agents) to break them down into well-defined stories.
• Leverage AI tools to streamline requirements, story definition, and development workflows.
• Develop and implement a vision for how generative AI can improve algorithmic optimization of schedules.
• Own the end-to-end user experience for schedulers interacting with the optimizer, including communicating tradeoffs, infeasible states, and sub-optimal solutions.
• Drive goal- and metric-setting processes with Engineering to motivate and measure squad outcomes.
• Maintain high standards and keep the team focused on delivering value and impact.
• Communicate product and technology decisions clearly across internal and external stakeholders.

About You

• Mindset: Energized by complex technical problems and the mechanics of how math, compute, and domain expertise solve real-world challenges. Comfortable analyzing solution metrics, edge cases, and engineering tradeoffs (speed vs. quality vs. feasibility).
• Experience: 4+ years in B2B SaaS product organizations, with at least 3 years as a Product Manager working on products with an algorithmic, decision-support, or operations research core.
• Skills: Strong in data analysis and metric design, with the ability to design experiments and interpret results. Demonstrated expertise in user-centric story writing, agile toolsets (Jira, Notion, Miro), and AI-enabled SDLC practices.
• Strengths: Collaborative, detail-oriented problem solver, and visual communicator (mockups, sketches, journey maps).
• Nice-to-have: Background in EdTech/education; experience with optimization, decision-support systems, or constraint satisfaction; familiarity with experimentation frameworks; background in operations research or a technical discipline.

Why Join Us

• Work with an exceptional team tackling meaningful challenges in education.
• Be part of a growing, financially healthy company with a proven product.
• Comprehensive benefits, including health and dental insurance, parental leave, 401(k), unlimited PTO, coworking access, and startup equity.