Job Description
PlayOn Sports is the leading platform for high school sports media, streaming live games to millions of fans and powering the next generation of prep sports experiences. We partner with schools, state associations, and athletic programs across the country to bring every play to every fan, wherever they are.
PlayOn is investing heavily in its computer vision and artificial intelligence pipeline, which transforms raw game footage into highlights, text recaps and statistics. This work sits at the intersection of live video, machine learning, and high school sports fandom, and it has the potential to fundamentally change what it means to watch a prep sports game online.
We’re looking for a Principal Product Manager to take end-to-end ownership of a new product line focused on these capabilities, from strategy all the way to launch and including the operating rhythm that keeps it healthy at scale. This is a product leadership role focused on the most dynamic area in technology today. You’ll set the vision, make the hard tradeoffs, and drive outcomes across engineering, data, design, and our external partners.
This role is for you if you thrive in ambiguous, high-impact environments, have a track record of turning early-stage bets into shipped products, and are energized by the idea of making high school sports moments more discoverable and meaningful.
This is an individual contributor role initially, with the expectation to grow a small team as the product line matures.
The Outcomes You Will Deliver
- A production-grade AI content pipeline, live across multiple sports.
- A sport-agnostic game data model that is PlayOn’s canonical source of game intelligence.
- An operating model that runs without you in the critical path.
What You Will Own
Strategy and Roadmap
- Set and own the multi-year vision for the product line, aligning business leadership, engineering, partners and vendors on scope, sequencing, and success metrics.
- Translate business goals including fan engagement and growth, content quality and coverage, and school retention and growth, into a concrete product strategy spanning computer vision capabilities, data pipelines, and fan-facing surfaces.
- Define and drive product line KPIs: accuracy benchmarks, processing latency, content coverage, and downstream product adoption.
Partner & Vendor Leadership
- Own the strategic relationship with our computer vision and AI vendors. Set the agenda, work to align roadmaps, and hold partners to their delivery commitments.
- Evaluate new CV capabilities including object detection, OCR, region-of-interest framing, tracking and automated highlight segmentation, and make the call on what to integrate, when, and why.
- Drive integrations forward with vendor engineering teams, unblocking hard problems and accelerating capability adoption.
Cross-Functional Leadership
- Partner with Data Engineering to build a sport-agnostic game data model that works across sports, game formats, broadcast configurations and game data sources.
- Influence cross-product roadmaps to ensure fan and school-facing surfaces keep pace with our AI pipeline and create critical feedback loops that inform modeling priorities.
- Give Operations and Support teams the visibility and tooling they need to triage and resolve content delivery issues without engineering escalation.
Operational Ownership
- Build the operating model for the product line, including sport-specific configurations, fallback handling and quality review workflows, and evolve it as the product scales.
- Close the loop between output quality (human review, fan signals, partner feedback) and upstream model or configuration improvements.
- Own health end-to-end. Surface risks early, resolve dependencies, and create transparency around content delivery, timing, quality and coverage.
What You’ll Bring
Required
- 8+ years in product management, technical product management, or a leadership role driving complex cross-team initiatives end to end.
- A track record of leading an important company initiative - one where you were the person accountable for the outcome, working across multiple engineering teams, external partners, and business stakeholders.
- Working fluency with AI/ML concepts. You understand what modern ML systems can and can’t do, you can reason about model quality tradeoffs, and you can hold your own in technical discussions with ML engineers and vendors. You don’t need to have led an AI product before; you do need to be ready to lead one now.
- Strong data fluency. Comfortable reading and writing SQL, interpreting quality metrics, and reasoning about schema design and pipeline tradeoffs.
- Experience owning external partner relationships at a strategic level, shaping integration contracts, holding partners accountable, and escalating effectively.
- Excellent communication. Crisp product writing, clear executive presence, and the ability to build alignment across technical and non-technical audiences.
- High tolerance for ambiguity; a proven instinct for creating structure and momentum in early-stage problem spaces.
Preferred
- Experience with live video streaming infrastructure or media processing pipelines (encoding, segmentation, metadata extraction).
- Familiarity with computer vision capabilities relevant to sports (object tracking, OCR, scene segmentation, highlight detection).
- Background in sports media, sports data, or adjacent domains (prep sports, broadcast, sports tech).
- Exposure to modern data stacks (Snowflake, dbt, Hightouch) and event-driven data architectures.
- Experience working with external sports data platforms (MaxPreps, NCAA data feeds, or similar) as data sources or integration targets.
Why This Role
- Real ownership from day one. This is a greenfield product line in one of PlayOn’s highest-priority investment areas. You’ll shape the strategy, run the execution, and own the outcome.
- Broad scope. You’ll operate critical aspects of our business, across product, partnerships, data and operations. It’s the kind of exposure and scope that builds the next generation of PlayOn leaders.
- Real-world scale. PlayOn streams tens of thousands of live high school games annually. Your work will generate millions of real moments for real fans.
- Mission that matters. High school sports matter to communities. The athletes you’re building for don’t have broadcast deals or highlight reels - yet. You’ll change that.
How You Play
Ownership over Participation- You take responsibility for achieving holistic outcomes, prioritize key objectives, and adapt quickly when situations require a different approach. You follow through even against the toughest challenges.
Team over Stars- You are a bridge builder, establishing processes and relationships with teams outside your own. You work to rally around common goals, find win-win solutions, compromise when necessary, and help others succeed.
Growth over Comfort- You are driven by a desire to grow and actively seek opportunities to expand your comfort zone, skills, and confidence. You embrace new challenges with curiosity, accepting discomfort and failure as opportunities to learn.
Fairness over Popularity- You approach decisions with a scientist’s mindset, challenging your assumptions and remaining objective. You consider long-term impact rather than relying on short-term gains, proactively seek others’ perspectives, and manage emotions in decision-making.
Company Overview
PlayOn is a dynamic growth-stage company dedicated to championing the spirit of play in the high school space. Backed by KKR, our family of brands—including GoFan, NFHS Network, and MaxPreps—empowers schools with innovative solutions and exceptional service. Our fan engagement platform is the only one that offers event ticketing, streaming, fundraising, concessions, merchandise sales, and website management in one place. We save administrators time so they can focus on what truly matters: supporting the students, staff, and fans who bring their programs to life.
Trusted by thousands of schools across the country, we’re here to help create more instant replays, hold-your-breath moments, last-minute comebacks, and games you want to watch over and over again.
When being there means everything, we make sure you never miss a moment.
Why you’ll love working at PlayOn
Product, potential, and people. We’re a leader in the high school event space, constantly evolving our product to meet the needs of administrators. We focus on solving real challenges, learning quickly, and creating impactful solutions.
This is a growth-stage company, meaning your contributions have real impact. You’ll have opportunities to grow your skills, tackle meaningful problems, and make a difference in the lives of schools and the students and fans they serve.
Our culture is built on accountability, collaboration, growth, and fairness. We don’t just show up—we show up for each other. Everyone wears the same jersey, and we play hard, make the extra pass, and cheer one another on. Losses teach us, challenges motivate us, and persistence drives us forward. We value integrity over shortcuts, choosing to do what’s right even when it’s hard. Together, we strive to be better every day—because we know that’s how we win as a team.
The Benefits We Offer
Multiple medical insurance plans to choose from
Dental, vision life and disability insurance
Employee Emergency Fund
Company equity (stock options)
Open PTO policy
401K plan with company match
Hybrid/flexible work environment
Note: Must be a full-time employee to participate in the company’s employee health benefit plan. Part-time employees and interns are not eligible to participate.
