Principal Product Manager - AI

Company: Hillspire - Office of Eric Schmidt
Location: Denver
Posted on: June 3, 2025

Job Description:

About TEGNA

TEGNA Inc. (NYSE: TGNA) serves local communities across the U.S. through trustworthy journalism, engaging content, and tools that help people navigate their daily lives. Through customized marketing solutions, we help businesses grow and thrive. With 64 television stations in 51 U.S. markets, TEGNA reaches approximately 100 million people every month across the web, mobile apps, streaming, and linear television. For more information, visit TEGNA.com .

As we continue to push the boundaries of AI in the media landscape, we're looking for a Principal Product Manager - AI to lead the development of AI-powered products that streamline content creation and storytelling, content discovery, audience engagement, and business growth. You'll lead a cross-functional team in developing best-in-class AI products and services to support and serve both internal content creators and our consumers. Your role will be critical to ensure that AI innovations deliver significant value to both users and the business.

Who you are

You are a strategic and technical product leader who understands both the potential and the limitations of AI. You have demonstrated success and expertise leading applied AI product and service development for consumer-driven organizations. You are fluent in concepts like NLP, LLMs, model inference, explainability, supervised learning, embeddings, and prompt engineering-even if you're not writing the code. You have a deep understanding of machine learning algorithms, NLP, recommendation systems, and generative AI to support content creation, enhance user engagement. You have expertise with cloud-based AI services and tools, with strong knowledge of AI ethics, fairness, and explainability, ensuring that AI solutions are transparent and accountable. You've successfully launched AI/ML features or platforms and understand how to balance feasibility, UX, data quality, and model performance. You have experience with data privacy and compliance, ensuring that AI applications respect user privacy and comply with regulations.

You have passion for local news, communities, and entertainment - and are deeply motivated to serve our consumers with elegant, intuitive, and helpful tools that will drive deep habituation, engagement, and value.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the product strategy and roadmap for AI/ML-driven features, infrastructure, or internal tooling and external users.
• Lead a cross-functional team of data scientists and engineers to translate models into user-facing features, ensuring performance, scalability, and ethical use.
• Conduct customer research, user testing, and data analysis to uncover pain points and validate AI use cases.
• Develop product specs, KPIs, and success criteria for AI initiatives, balancing accuracy, latency, and user experience.
• Partner with legal, compliance, and security teams to ensure responsible AI practices and mitigate model risks.
• Stay informed of advancements in AI/ML, large language models (LLMs), and generative AI, and evaluate potential for integration into the product.
• Communicate product vision, priorities, and progress clearly to executive leadership and stakeholders.
  Qualifications
  
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field or equivalent experience
  • 6-7 years of product management experience, with 3+ years focused on AI/ML, data products, or technical platforms.
  • Proven track record of launching successful AI-powered products or features.
  • Strong technical understanding of AI/ML concepts and experience working closely with data scientists and ML engineers.
  • Experience with LLMs, foundation models, or generative AI platforms (e.g., OpenAI, Hugging Face, Anthropic, etc.).
  • Ability to translate complex technical concepts into intuitive user experiences.
  • Strong analytical mindset and experience using data to inform product decisions.
  • Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and leadership skills.
    Why Join Us?
    
    • Shape the future of storytelling in a mission-driven media company.
    • Work with award-winning editorial and creative teams.
    • Lead at scale: millions of downloads, diverse audiences, and daily impact.
    • Competitive compensation and excellent benefits.
    • A fast-paced culture that values innovation, ownership, and collaboration
    • High-impact role with visibility and influence at the executive level #LI-MS1
      
      Pay Range
      
      $157,000 - $182,000 USD
      
      Benefits:
      
      TEGNA offers comprehensive benefits designed to safeguard the physical, mental and financial health of our employees and their families. TEGNA offers two medical plan options for full and part-time employees through Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, as well as access to dental and eye care coverage; fertility, surrogacy and adoption assistance; disability and life insurance.
      
      Our 401(k) program offers full, part-time and temporary employees the opportunity to contribute 1% - 80% of their pay on a pre-tax basis to TEGNA's 401(k). Contributions made up to the first 4% of pay are eligible for a 100% match from the company and are 100% vested from day one.
      
      Regardless of participation in TEGNA medical plans, ALL employees and their eligible family members receive nine free virtual doctor's appointments with a physician through Teladoc, and 12 free annual therapy sessions with a licensed clinician through Spring Health.
      
      TEGNA offers a generous Paid Time Off (PTO) benefit as well as nine paid holidays per year.
      
      * Some jobs are covered by a collective bargaining agreement and thus some or all of the benefits described herein may not apply. For example, some newsroom bargaining unit employees receive health and retirement benefits under plans administered by the union.
      
      EEO statement:
      
      TEGNA Inc. is a proud equal opportunity employer. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, hiring and developing individuals from diverse backgrounds and experiences to add to our collaborative culture. We value and consider applications from all qualified candidates without regard to actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, family responsibilities, disability, medical condition, enrollment in college or vocational school, political affiliation, military or veteran status, citizenship status, genetic information, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law. TEGNA will reasonably accommodate qualified individuals with disabilities in accordance with applicable law. If you are in need of an accommodation in order to submit your application, please email askhr@tegna.com
      
      Recruiting Fraud Alert:
      
      To all candidates: your personal information and online safety are important to us. Only TEGNA Recruiters or Hiring Managers will reach out to you regarding consideration of your application or background. Communications with TEGNA employees will either come from a TEGNA email address with a domain of tegna.com or one of our affiliate station domains.
      
      Recruiters or Hiring Managers will never request payments, ask for financial account information or sensitive information such as social security numbers.
      
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Keywords: Hillspire - Office of Eric Schmidt, Westminster , Principal Product Manager - AI, Executive , Denver, Colorado