Technical Product Manager (Data / AI), Creative Engine

About The Company

Sapphire Studios is a performance creative agency that makes ads for brands on TikTok, Meta, and TikTok Shop. They work with 2,000+ creators and produce thousands of videos per year. Their internal portal handles the entire workflow: creator onboarding, contracts, campaign management, content review, and payments.

They're now building a Creative Engine that turns creative strategy from gut instinct into a data-driven process. Data today lives in too many disconnected places — the Creative Engine brings it all into one central home, across performance creative, TikTok Shop, and TikTok LIVE, so the team can derive real insights instead of digging through separate platforms. AI watches and tags every video they produce, breaking each one into the hooks, formats, and patterns that drive results, and connects that to the sales and engagement data flowing out of Shop and Live. It all feeds one queryable system, a "brain" a strategist can ask "what are the top hooks for beauty this week?" and get a real answer back. The team reaches it through dashboards, Slack, and Cowork. It starts as the internal engine the creative team runs on, and over time clients log in to it too — this is the core of where the company is headed.

How they work:

• Small team, high ownership. You own your work end to end, from idea (or data model) to deployed UI. No committees.

• AI-assisted everything. Claude Code and coding agents are used daily as a real part of the workflow.

• Ship constantly. They deploy to production multiple times per day. Scope stays small and tight.

• Remote, async. Communication happens via Slack and GitHub. No standups or status meetings for the sake of meetings.

About The Role

Sapphire Studios is looking for a Technical Product Manager to own the Creative Engine, the data and intelligence layer behind the agency. You'll sit at the intersection of creative, performance, and engineering, and your job is to turn what the best strategists know intuitively into a system the whole company can query.

This is a product role with a creative soul and a technical spine. You understand what makes an ad win, and you can translate that into data models, specs, and roadmaps that engineering can build. When a strategist asks "what are the top hooks for beauty this week?", you're the person who designed the system that answers it. This is a data-first product — the architecture comes before the app, and you'll help define both.

What You'll Do

• Own the product vision and roadmap for the Creative Engine, translating creative strategy and performance insights into a data product the whole agency runs on.

• Define the insights that matter — work with creative strategists to turn fuzzy questions ("what are the top hooks for beauty right now?") into structured, queryable outputs.

• Partner with engineering on the data foundation, shaping the data model and pipelines that pull, structure, and connect data across performance creative, TikTok Shop, TikTok LIVE, Meta, and the creator portal.

• Design the "brain" — define how viral organic references, top-performing ads, and creator history come together into creative inspiration on demand, not just a keyword search.

• Spec how the team accesses the Engine: dashboards, tag browsers, and insight queries strategists use daily, plus access through Slack, Cowork, and the web portal (internal team first, clients next).

• Streamline UGC production workflows into scalable, repeatable systems alongside engineering and creative.

• Run structured creative tests to evolve formats, validate what actually drives performance, and feed those learnings back into the Engine.

• Turn winning patterns into reusable assets: content briefs, hook frameworks, and a library of UGC templates grounded in performance data.

• Be the connective tissue between creative, talent, and engineering.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 4+ years in product management, creative strategy that moved into product, or a technical PM role bridging creative and engineering teams.

• Deep understanding of performance creative and UGC — you know what makes an ad work and can articulate why.

• A track record of translating fuzzy, qualitative requirements into clear specs, data models, and roadmaps.

• Comfortable working closely with engineers on data architecture — you can hold your own in a conversation about schemas, pipelines, and APIs even if you're not the one writing the code.

• Experience with structured creative testing and iteration.

• Fluency with AI creative and dev tools: LLMs for scripting and analysis, plus hands-on familiarity with agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Cowork).

• High ownership, low ego, and comfortable with ambiguity on a small team with minimal process.

Preferred

• Domain experience in ad tech, creator economy, performance marketing, agency, or marketplace platforms.

• Hands-on experience shipping AI/LLM-powered product features.

• Technical fluency: comfortable with SQL, can read code, has built prototypes (even scrappy ones) with AI coding tools.

• Familiarity with the TikTok and Meta ad ecosystems and their APIs.

• Close enough to data to know when a simple scoring function beats a complex model.

Location

Remote, full-time, US time zones.