Founding Product Manager (Applied AI) - Thorin

Title: Founding Product Manager

Location: San Francisco

Company: Thorin

Stage: Seed | Incubated at 8VC

About Thorin

Thorin is an AI startup born out of 8VC’s "Build", focused on solving AI-human coordination by analyzing organizational email to map and automate recurring business workflows. Thorin enables leaders to run their businesses like a program — with real-time visibility, predictive control, and automated execution across the enterprise

With backing and product vision from Joe Lonsdale, Thorin is 8VC’s latest incubation, following the success of Affinity, Addepar, and other unicorns.

About the Role

We’re hiring a Founding Product Manager to help define Thorin’s product from first principles. This is a core founding role, sitting at the intersection of AI systems, enterprise infrastructure, and real-world business operations.

You will own product direction end-to-end: shaping Thorin’s primitives, deciding what the system should understand and automate, and ensuring that powerful agentic capabilities are exposed through products that enterprise leaders can trust, adopt, and scale.

This role is not only about backlog management. It’s about deciding what Thorin should become.

What You’ll Do

• Own Thorin’s product vision and roadmap across visibility, process modeling, guardrails, and agentic execution

• Define the core abstractions of the Thorin platform — what a “process,” “policy,” “metric,” and “agent” mean in a living enterprise system

• Partner deeply with AI Engineers to shape agent behavior, evaluation frameworks, reliability thresholds, and iteration loops

• Work hand-in-hand with Infrastructure leadership to ensure product decisions meet enterprise-grade security, compliance, and scalability requirements

• Collaborate with Product Engineers to design and ship intuitive user experiences on top of complex AI systems

• Lead customer discovery with design partners and early enterprise adopters, translating messy operational reality into clear product direction

What You Bring

• 5+ years of experience building and owning complex software products, ideally in enterprise, platform, or infrastructure-adjacent domains

• Proven ability to operate as a founding or early-stage PM, defining product direction in the absence of precedent

• Strong technical fluency — you can reason about AI systems, distributed infrastructure, and product tradeoffs without needing abstraction layers.

• CS degree strongly preferred

• Experience working closely with engineers on systems where reliability, trust, and correctness matter

• Exceptional product judgment — you can turn ambiguous, high-stakes problems into crisp product decisions

• Comfort with uncomfortable ambiguity — you enjoy operating without playbooks

• Clear, structured project management and communication skills — you can align engineers, customers, and leadership around a shared product vision

Bonus:

• Experience with AI-native, agentic, or automation-heavy products

• Familiarity with enterprise workflows

• Background in process modeling, operational analytics, or enterprise systems of record

• Prior experience selling or deploying products into large enterprises

About the Team

• You’ll be one of the earliest non-engineering hires and a core part of the founding team

• You’ll work directly with senior AI, infrastructure, and product engineers building Thorin’s technical core

• You’ll collaborate closely with design partners and enterprise leaders shaping the product in production

• You’ll work directly with Joe Lonsdale, who remains deeply involved in product vision, strategy, and hiring

• Expect extreme ownership, rapid iteration, and the opportunity to define a new category of AI-driven operational software