Principal Product Manager (Founding) - AI Governance and Agent Orchestration Platform

Principal Product Manager (Founding) — Nivalto (Stealth) | AI Governance OS & Agent Orchestration Platform

Location: Remote First (San Franciso Bay Area Candidates Only)

Compensation: Equity-first (Pre-Seed) → Post-Seed Salary $190K–$230K + 20–25% Performance Bonus

Equity Range: 0.75%–1.25% (4-year vest with 1-year cliff, milestone top-ups)

Reports To: VP Product

Stage: Pre-Seed → Seed (Fundraising Q1 2026)

Seniority: Principal / Founding-Level IC (clear path to Director of Product)

Time Commitment: Fractional (10–15 hrs/week) pre-seed (equity-based) → Post-Seed full-time

About Nivalto

Nivalto (stealth) is building AURA, a luxury AI operating system for ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) families and their advisors. Built on privacy-first AI orchestration and trust-by-design, AURA helps Principals, Spouses, Heirs, and Advisors manage assets, relationships, and decisions across generations.

Beyond wealth, Nivalto is developing the critical infrastructure powering the emerging AI agent economy—a $400B+ market opportunity by 2030. We're solving the hardest challenges enterprises face when deploying AI agents at scale in regulated environments, including how those agents are allowed to move money.

Our platform unifies governance and controlled execution through:

• Open Protocol: industry-standard protocol for governed agent infrastructure (positioned for standardization)
• Cloud Platform: for enterprise deployment and management
• Trusted Runtime & Edge Architecture: secure, high-performance execution environments for governed workflows
• AI Payments Fabric: policy-aware transaction controls for AI-driven workflows (included, not the center)
• Legacy Core (AURA Fabric): integration layer for mission-critical systems

Why This Role Is Unique

Ground-Floor Category Creation

You’re not iterating on an existing product—you’re helping define a new category: AI Governance + Control Plane infrastructure for agentic systems.

Founder-Level Ownership

This isn’t a feature PM role. You’ll own a core product pillar end-to-end—from discovery to prototyping to MVP to pilot readiness—and you’ll help shape the story that investors and buyers will judge.

Deep Tech, Real Proof

Your work turns “governance” from slides into shippable primitives: policy → enforcement → evidence.

Role Overview

You will be a founding Principal Product Manager responsible for turning Nivalto’s governance spine and agent orchestration stack into pilot-ready product surfaces (UX + APIs + evidence outputs).

What You’ll Own (Seed Round Focus)

AI Governance Protocol & Cloud Platform

• Define product requirements for the governance control plane: policy definition, role/permission models, decision records, obligations, evidence, and audit exports
• Build the operator experience for governed agents: what admins/security/compliance can approve, override, replay, and export
• Define the promotion path with gated evidence bundles at each step
• Package a pilot-ready offering: what’s included, what’s required, what’s deferred to GA

AURA Agent Operating System

• Ensure AURA workflows demonstrate governance in action: Permissions, Prompt Engine orchestration, and secure collaboration
• Own the “trust outputs” for pilots: what we can prove, what evidence we generate, and how we explain it

AI Payments Fabric

• Shape requirements for governed transaction intents: limits, approvals, policy checks, evidence capture, and reconciliation hooks
• Ensure the same policy → enforcement → evidence chain holds for payment-adjacent workflows without becoming a payments-only PM role

What You’ll Do

Product Strategy

• Own a seed-stage roadmap for your pillar aligned to fundraising milestones and design-partner pilots
• Make build vs. buy vs. partner decisions for foundational pieces (policy authoring, evidence stores, audit export formats, observability)
• Convert protocol concepts into product primitives customers can adopt quickly

Product Execution (Ship)

• Develop prototypes, write implementation-ready PRDs/spec packs: scope, non-goals, acceptance criteria, test scenarios, and rollout plan
• Develop prototypes, lead experiments and iterate product value continuously
• Drive weekly execution cadence: prioritization, edge-case resolution, scope control, and unblocking decisions
• Define and ship MVPs that are small, credible, and instrumented

Customer Discovery & Validation

• Run discovery with CIO/CISO/AI governance, compliance, and platform leaders to validate the minimum governance baseline required for pilots
• Translate procurement reality into product requirements: audit exports, incident response, vendor oversight, evidence completeness, and operator controls
• For AURA: discovery with family offices, advisors, and private banks to validate high-trust workflows

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner with engineering, design, and the CEO to keep scope coherent and execution-forward
• Produce buyer-facing and investor-facing artifacts that explain: what we enforce, what we log, and what we can prove

Evals & Quality (Agent + Governance Systems)

• Define and maintain an Evaluation Plan for each agent workflow: success metrics, failure modes, red-team cases, and acceptance thresholds before pilot launch.
• Build a lightweight Conformance Suite of test prompts + tool-call scenarios that runs on every release (e.g., policy adherence, PII redaction, approval-chain correctness, no-loosen bounds, evidence completeness).
• Specify golden datasets and golden traces (expected “policy → enforcement → evidence” outputs) and use them to detect regressions across model/tool changes.
• Establish quality gates for agent workflow promotions: minimum pass-rates, required evidence artifacts, and escalation rules when evals fail.
• Partner with engineering to instrument online eval signals in pilots (e.g., override rate, denial reasons, incident frequency, replay discrepancies) and convert learnings into updated tests and controls.

Required Qualifications

Product Leadership

• 8+ years product management (must be Principal-level IC capable)
• Proven 0→1 execution: concept → shipped MVP → customer validation
• Experience shipping B2B platforms / control-plane products for technical buyers
• Exceptional written communication: PRDs, decision docs, API-first thinking

Domain Expertise (Governance / Platform-first)

You should be strong in at least one:

• Governance / Security / Policy Platforms: identity/authorization, policy engines, audit logging, compliance tooling, operator UX
• AI/ML Platform Products: LLM workflows, agent systems, guardrails (approvals/redaction/evidence), developer tooling

Technical Depth (Required)

• Ability to read APIs, reason about system boundaries, and write implementation-ready requirements
• Comfort with state machines, enforcement boundaries, and evidence/receipts concepts
• Familiarity with hashing/signing concepts is a plus
• Payments familiarity is a bonus, not required

Education

• Bachelor’s degree (CS/Engineering/Business/Policy) or equivalent experience
• MBA is a preferred

Highly Valued Experience

Governance / Evidence Systems

• Built auditability-first systems: receipts/logging, replayability, evidence bundling, export patterns
• Built pilot assurance materials and procurement-ready artifacts
• Experience shaping incident response + third-party/vendor oversight programs into usable product requirements

AI/Agentic Systems

• Built agentic workflows that perform real tool actions with guardrails
• Turned “AI safety” into concrete product requirements and operational controls

Platform & Ecosystem

• Shipped developer platforms: SDKs, APIs, docs, onboarding flows, reference implementations
• Experience with open standards or open-source ecosystems is a plus

Payments (Optional / Bonus)

• Experience with approvals/limits/reconciliation in spend or treasury systems (helpful but not required)

Apply

Send your LinkedIn/CV and a cover letter to careers@nivalto.com with subject: “Principal Product Manager (Founding)”

Work authorization: Open to US and international; relocation/visa considered for exceptional candidates.

EEO & Confidentiality: We’re an equal opportunity employer. Some technical details are shared only post-NDA due to stealth