Product Builder, Vault

The Role

Functionally the Vault is a high-end warehouse with sophisticated internal software and a marketplace bolted directly to it. This is a builder seat, not a product management seat. You own the Vault from arrival to exit: ingest SLAs, intake and routing, exception handling and QC, outtake, international shipping, customs, insurance, carrier integrations, and the tooling that runs all of it. And you own it the whole way: you stand in the room and watch the bottleneck, you pull the station data yourself, you write the tool that removes it, you ship it, you watch what P90 does, you keep it or you kill it.

What this role is not: writing PRDs for someone else to implement, running a quarterly roadmap ritual, managing an ops pod, or translating between the warehouse and engineering. If that's the shape of your last five years, this probably isn't the right fit, and we'd rather say so up front than waste your time. You report directly to the CEO.

If you want a CEO in the build with you, this is that. If you want distance from the top, it isn't. The metric you own:
Time-to-Liquidity (median and P90). Supporting KPIs: ingest and outtake SLA adherence, cost per item processed (labor minutes, rework, fully loaded unit cost), throughput per FTE and items per week, error and rework rate, inventory activation rate (vaulted to live to sold), ship-and-decide velocity (tools and changes shipped per week), and Vault-related seller satisfaction.

• The end-to-end lifecycle, in code. Receiving and ingest, processing and routing, exception handling and QC, outtake and customer handoff. Define measurable SLAs at every stage, instrument them yourself so the numbers exist, enforce them, and hunt bottlenecks systematically instead of working around them. The station-level data that tells you where P90 went does not exist yet in the shape you'll need.
  
  You build that too.

• The Vault tooling, built not requested. Queue management, prioritization, labeling, SLA tracking, the exception taxonomy and the software that enforces it. Retool got the operation this far and it is now the ceiling. Replace it with durable software, starting with the version you write yourself and put in front of an ops lead this week. You'll be in Python, Postgres, and AWS, with React and Type Script for the surfaces the vault team actually touches.

• International shipping and logistics. Customs, insurance, labeling, carrier integrations. Cross-border is where delay and risk concentrate. Make it fast and boring, wire it into the SLA and liquidity picture, and put document models on the paperwork so outtake stops being a human transcription step.

• Inventory activation and liquidity. Shrink the distance between "in vault" and "live on marketplace." Find where activation stalls by item tier, seller segment, and station, then build the product that closes it. Partner with Pricing, Auctions, CX, and Risk so vaulted inventory gets listed and monetized quickly.

• Quality, reliability, and trust. Error rates, rework, and the exception taxonomy are yours. A mis-handled high-value item isn't a ticket. It's someone's money and someone's trust, and the control that catches it is software you wrote.

• The bets and the trade-offs. A short quarterly plan tied to time-to-liquidity, cost per item, and activation rate, and a weekly record of what actually shipped. Work shoulder to shoulder with Ops, Engineering, Pricing, Marketplace, and CX. Support exploration of Vault-as-a-Service without letting it distract from core execution. Communicate the trade-offs to the CEO plainly.

• You've been shipping to production since week two, and the team reviews your PRs the way they review each other's.

• Time-to-liquidity is materially down, at the median and at P90, driven by tools you built rather than by headcount.

• SLAs are real across ingest, processing, and outtake: published, instrumented by you, tracked, met.

• Leadership runs on your dashboard. A weekly Vault operating view people actually open, wired to live station data.

• 30 to 50% fewer manual handoffs, with exception handling running as a classified queue rather than a chat thread.

• The Retool ceiling is gone. The queue and SLA tooling is real software, and the vault team asks you for the next thing rather than working around the last one.

• Volume scales without linear headcount. That's the test of whether the system got better or just got busier.

We don't want to hear that you use Claude every day. Everyone does. We want to know what you've built with it. Concretely, in this role:

• Put an agent on the exception queue: it reads the intake anomaly, classifies it against the exception taxonomy, pulls the item history, and hands a vault tech a recommended action instead of a mystery

• Use document models on cross-border paperwork, customs forms, declared values, carrier labels, insurance schedules, so international outtake stops being a human transcription step

• Build the Retool replacement…