Product Engineer III

About the Role

OpenGov is hiring a Product Engineer to own a domain within our ERP — the financial system of record for state and local government. You will own a product area end-to-end: customer discovery, roadmap, user experience, build, launch, and adoption. This role leverages AI-native tooling to handle execution work, allowing you to focus on strategic decision-making and customer understanding.

The Product Engineer role emphasizes owning the product, driven by an obsession with who customers are, what they need, and the business outcomes dependent on solving their problems. Writing code and building interfaces are skills to grow into, facilitated by AI-native tooling, rather than a primary requirement on day one. The focus is on judgment and making critical decisions within a domain where choices have long-term impact.

Domain Role

The ERP at OpenGov is a suite, and this role owns a domain within it. Potential domains include:

• Financial Management: General ledger, chart of accounts, accounts payable, accounts receivable, fixed assets, purchase card, requisitions, bank reconciliation, project accounting.
• Budgeting & Performance: Budget creation, proposals on the ERP chart of accounts, worksheets, multi-period adoption, amendments, transfers, workforce planning, performance measures.
• Reporting & Financial Statements: Financial report engine, multi-hierarchy and multi-entity reporting, GASB-compliant statements, datasets, pipelines, and transparency surfaces.
• Procurement: Intake through solicitation, evaluation, award, contract management, and vendor records.

Decisions made in this role will touch adjacent domains such as payroll, HCM, utility billing, tax and revenue, permitting, and asset management. Coordination with these domains is expected rather than escalation. Specific challenges in this role include chart-of-accounts migration/mutation, multi-entity structures, reporting parity for legacy product migrations, and audit-readiness as a product capability.

What You'll Own

• A domain: Defined set of customers, problems, and measurable business outcomes. You are the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) for all product aspects in that domain.
• The roadmap: Define what gets built, in what order, and why, informed by customer research, competitive context, and business goals.
• The end-to-end user experience: Define flows and validate designs within the design system.
• The ship: Drive intent, design, build coordination, launch, and iteration from idea to deployment.
• The number: Accountable for adoption, go-live, and retention targets, and associated revenue.
• Field time: Embedded with Customer Product Squads, spending roughly 20-25 hours per implementation in discovery and lighter oversight post go-live, capped at about a quarter of your time. You will fix bugs on-site rather than filing tickets.

How AI Works In This Role

AI-native tooling handles significant portions of traditional product management and UX design tasks, allowing redirection of time to higher-leverage work.

• Spec writing: The prototype serves as the spec; product briefs are generated from what you build.
• UX design: AI generates screens from the design system based on flow definitions; design-review agents sanity-check builds.
• Research synthesis: AI clusters and themes interview notes, transcripts, and usage data for your interpretation and decision-making.
• Release content: AI drafts release notes, announcements, and enablement material from shipped features.
• Code review and test coverage: Automated tools catch style, security, and regression issues; AI generates test cases from acceptance criteria.
• Competitive and regulatory monitoring: AI surfaces competitor moves and changes in accounting standards/reporting requirements for your point-of-view and decision-making.

AI does not replace customer understanding, decision-making on priorities, ownership of outcomes, or building cross-functional trust. You are also expected to improve the AI tooling itself by identifying gaps and surfacing them as platform investment requests.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and communicate the product vision for your domain, grounded in customer research, competitive context, and business goals.
• Conduct and synthesize discovery with government finance staff to make clear, defensible decisions about what to build and cut.
• Own the roadmap: prioritize ruthlessly, explain reasoning publicly, and revise when new facts warrant it.
• Define user experience flows and interaction patterns within the design system, escalating genuinely new system-level patterns.
• Build using AI-native tooling, move from intent to working software, validate with customers, and iterate. Own your PRs through review.
• Write acceptance criteria precise enough for automated tests to verify, treating quality as a pipeline property.
• Partner with engineering leads and squad engineers to unblock builds and resolve ambiguity in real time.
• Embed with Professional Services on implementations and migrations, running discovery, closing gaps, and feeding learnings back into the roadmap.
• Track adoption, usage, go-live health, and business outcomes to drive iteration.
• Represent your domain in customer conversations, QBRs, steering committees, and cross-functional reviews.
• Coordinate directly with adjacent domains when customer needs span multiple areas, bringing a recommendation.

Core Skill Sets — Non-Negotiables

Ranked in order of importance and impact:

• Ownership under ambiguity: Make good decisions with incomplete information and iterate faster than waiting for certainty. Energized by accountability as the sole DRI.
• Demonstrated product ownership with a track record: Product management, product design, or closely adjacent role where you shipped customer-facing products and can clearly define your ownership.
• Depth in a complex, workflow-heavy, compliance-bound B2B domain: Financial software, ERP, accounting, or similarly regulated enterprise domain where being wrong had significant consequences.
• Customer discovery you have actually run: Conducted discovery, synthesized research, and changed a roadmap or design based on learnings, with specific examples.
• Written communication: Articulate product decisions clearly to ensure alignment across engineering, design, services, and leadership.
• Willingness to build: Code fluency is a career accelerator. Experience in AI-native workflows is a plus; proficiency is required.

Preferred Experience

• Government finance, public sector accounting, or GovTech SaaS; or direct experience as a finance officer, budget analyst, auditor, or controller.
• Familiarity with fund accounting, chart-of-accounts design, GASB reporting, the annual budget cycle, or external audit workflows.
• Experience with data migration or platform replacement programs.
• Multi-entity or multi-organization data models, consolidated reporting, or component-unit structures.
• Hands-on time with AI development tooling (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor), design systems, and component libraries.