Associate Product Manager, Technical (Los Altos)
At early-stage startup Cheiron, an Associate PM (Technical) turns product briefs for AI-native pharma CMC software into engineering-ready specs — scoping builds, writing feature stories with acceptance criteria, reviewing data models and API contracts, and defining correctness for AI-driven regulatory features. Onsite in Los Altos; 0–3 years experience.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Los Altos
- Work setup
- Onsite
- Seniority
- Junior
- Employment
- Internship
- Experience
- 0+ years
- Category
- Product
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 0–3 years of experience in product management, technical program management, software engineering, or a related technical role (internships count)
- Strong technical foundation: can read a codebase, reason about system architecture, and ground a spec in what already exists
- CS, engineering, or equivalent technical degree from a top-tier institution
- Has written structured technical documents: specs, design docs, architecture proposals, or research papers with clear requirements and edge cases
- Has built something in an environment with real constraints (startup internship, research lab, side project with users, or entrepreneurial venture)
- Fluent with AI tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent
- Clear, precise writing — a stranger can implement the spec without asking questions
- Builds a mental model of unfamiliar domains or systems before deciding what to change
- Goes deep rather than wide and considers outputs from the perspective of everyone who will read them
Nice to have
- Has built AI-native products or projects: LLM integrations, structured extraction, agentic workflows, evaluation harnesses, or knowledge graphs
- Technical background (CS, engineering, math, physics) with production code, infrastructure, or a technical project shipped end-to-end
- Has taken a complex unknown domain and built something in it
- Has interned at or worked in a startup (under 50 employees) with real ownership over a product area
- Experience with document-heavy, data-quality, or compliance-adjacent products
Full description
Onsite, Los Altos, CA · Product · Full time · 0–3 years experience
About Cheiron
In July 2026, Cheiron announced an $8 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures, bringing total funding to $13 million to date, with the backing and strategic support of industry veterans including Moderna co-founder and MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer, former Pfizer Chief Medical Officer Freda Lewis-Hall, Chai Discovery co-founder and CEO Josh Meier, former Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan, and former Apple AI chief John Giannandrea.
Cheiron is building the first AI-native operating system designed to represent an entire drug program as a single connected system. The company's platform helps biopharma teams represent, reason over, and stress-test the full state of a drug development program, including the claims, evidence, assumptions, risks, decisions, and commitments that determine whether a therapy advances. In less than six months since launch, Cheiron has been adopted by tens of thousands of biopharma professionals and deployed by major drug developers, and is already used by 7 of Korea's top 10 biopharma companies.
Cheiron is expanding into pharmaceutical CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls) teams. CMC governs how a drug is made, tested, and kept consistent across its entire commercial life. The work involves hundreds of regulatory commitments, post-approval changes, and cross-market submissions. Today it runs on documents, spreadsheets, and institutional memory. Cheiron augments manual workflows with a CMC regulatory-specific intelligence and reasoning layer.
Founded in 2024 by Stanford-trained AI researchers. The team includes leaders with combined decades of experience across pharma and biotech. Headquartered in Los Altos, California. We are building and deploying the product now with rapid expansion into global markets.
The role
You will turn product concepts into engineering-ready specs, working across product, life sciences, and engineering. Concepts arrive with the “what” and “why” framed. You own the “how, specifically”: how each component fits the existing architecture, what to extend, what to leave alone, and what the build looks like on paper before a line of code is written.
CMC is a specialized world with its own regulatory frameworks and its own workflows. You do not need to know it coming in. You’ll have a life sciences team alongside you who own the domain vocabulary and regulatory rules, and you’ll learn the domain by working closely with them. What matters is that you’re the kind of person who immerses until you can reason from first principles.
This is a ground-floor role at an early-stage company. You’ll work directly with the founders, product/design, life sciences, and engineering teams. The learning curve is steep, the scope is real, and your specs go directly to pharma teams making real regulatory decisions.