Principal Product Manager

Who We Are Meridian Softworks ’s mission is to modernize the life insurance and annuity industry by helping carriers acquire, service, and engage their customers through any distribution channel. Meridian Softworks ’s products empower life insurance carriers, agents, employees, and customers to have the digital experiences employees and consumers have come to expect in the rapidly advancing tech climate. We're is seeking a Principal Product Manager to serve as a high-level individual contributor. This is a "Super IC" role designed for a seasoned product leader who prefers deep-diving into complex domains and driving massive strategic impact without the overhead of people management. You will be the functional architect and strategist for our new IRI DFA API product area. This is a high-stakes, V1-to-Scale opportunity. You will be responsible for translating the IRI’s industry-standard specifications into a robust, highly configurable API suite for the annuity carriers that are our customers. What You’ll Do Strategic Impact: Define the long-term roadmap for the DFA APIs, ensuring they don't just meet technical standards but provide a competitive edge for carriers. Vision & Roadmapping: Define how DFA APIs evolve into and alongside our CoreCONNECT platform, enabling carriers and partners to build differentiated experiences on top of a flexible, extensible API layer. Evangelism : Seed the market for an emerging product by working with marketing, sales, and potential customers. Industry Representation: Serve as Meridian Softworks ’s representative and thought leader in industry working groups shaping IRI Digital First for Annuities standards, influencing how carriers, distributors, and vendors define and adopt modern annuity APIs. Voice of the Customer: Engage deeply with annuity carriers and distributors to understand the friction points in the current annuity ecosystem and how our APIs can solve them. Feature Specification: Author clear, actionable specs for complex API workflows that account for high configurability requirements. Product Delivery: Partner closely with engineering to build a high-performance, scalable API layer. You’ll ensure the product is "developer-friendly" for both internal professional services teams and external systems integrators. Cross-functional Collaboration: Align internal stakeholders on our strategy and roadmap. Partner with product engineering to build, with professional services to ensure the APIs are easily deployable in the field, and with sales to help close customers. What We’re Looking For Must-Have Qualifications: The "Shape" of a Leader: You are a "Product Architect" (strong in Customer Insight and Strategy) who knows how to "Build" (strong in Execution). Product Leadership : Owned a product within an enterprise software market with high-touch direct sales. Enterprise Complexity: Experience in a highly concentrated, enterprise market (Insurance, Fintech, or Healthtech) where software must be highly configurable and integrated by 3rd parties. API-First Mindset: You understand that an API is the product. You have experience defining technical requirements for developers and system integrators. Strategic Autonomy: A proven track record of taking a vague market opportunity (like a new industry standard) and turning it into a concrete, successful product. Based in the US/Americas: Ability to work effectively with US-based carriers and time zones. Preferred Qualifications: Annuity/Life Insurance Domain Expertise: Familiarity with the annuity lifecycle, distribution channels, and carrier operations is a massive plus. PaaS/Platform Experience: Experience building "Lego block" style software that allows carriers to build their own unique experiences on top of your foundation. Industry Standards Body Experience: Prior involvement with an industry standards body like IRI, ISO or ACORD. Our culture We are a close group at Meridian Softworks , bound together by strong working relationships and a common mission in the industry. The success of our customers is very important to us, and we value merit in the workplace, long-term thinking, and the flourishing of all our employees. Experience working in a startup or an ability to adapt to a small, rapidly-growing company mindset is required. There is an expectation that you can be agile amidst the fluctuations inherent to a young company establishing itself in the marketplace. Frequently we have to come together as a team and go beyond the responsibility of our roles to ensure success. Base annual salary $205,000—$230,000 USD Our Guiding Principles Our products are for nothing if their creators are not fulfilled in their work. We want our employees to flourish at Meridian Softworks . We do not fawn over status or titles, instead, we honor effort and intelligence. The best idea wins no matter which colleague proposed it. We do not shortcut our mission with overblown claims or false promises. Sticking to the truth is both a strategy and a principle for us. Meridian Softworks is an Equal Opportunity Empl