AI Product Builder

AI Product Builder at Fluent Software

Fluent Software Group is part of Valsoft Corporation’s family of operating groups—a global leader in acquiring and growing vertical market software companies. We focus on specialized industries where deep expertise truly makes the difference.

At Fluent, we give founders and their teams a forever home—preserving their culture and momentum while unlocking new resources, technology, and proven operational playbooks that fuel sustainable, long-term growth.

The Mission

We’re building AI startups inside an established portfolio of vertical software companies—and we need builders to make it happen.

Our mandate is to partner with Fluent’s existing businesses to create new AI-powered products and sell them into their verticalized customer bases—and once proven, expand beyond them. The starting point could be either: agentifying an existing workflow that the business software already helps facilitate today, or building a net-new product altogether. The through-line is simple—we’re creating customer value in one of two forms: helping them operate more efficiently, or helping them capture revenue opportunities they’re currently missing. Each portfolio company has deep domain expertise and a loyal customer base. What they need is someone who can turn AI potential into real products that customers will pay for.

This is startup building with a cheat code: you get established customer relationships, industry expertise, existing infrastructure, and revenue to validate against—without starting from zero.

The Opportunity

This isn’t a traditional product role, and it’s not a traditional engineering role. It’s both—and neither. We’re looking for an AI Product Builder: someone who wakes up thinking about customer problems, spends their morning in conversations with users, and has a working prototype by the end of the week.

You’ll bring the AI product vision and prototyping speed. The portfolio company’s R&D team brings domain knowledge, production infrastructure, and engineering depth. Together, you ship. You won’t be training foundational models—you’ll be integrating AI APIs and using tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and bolt.new to deliver real, customer-facing solutions at startup speed.

This role is designed for someone with the hunger to become a startup CTO or CEO. As the product takes shape, your scope and title grow with it. If you build something that works, you’ll be the one who leads it.

The Mindset We’re Hiring For

• Entrepreneurial Ownership: You treat every product idea like it’s your startup. You don’t wait for permission, a roadmap, or perfect information. You make decisions, own outcomes, and move fast—even when the path isn’t clear.
• Customer Obsession: You’re energized by customer conversations, not exhausted by them. You actively seek out users, listen deeply, and translate what they’re really saying (not just what they’re asking for) into product opportunities. You’re the kind of person who’d rather spend an hour on a customer call than an hour in a planning meeting.
• Bias Toward Action: When others are still debating the approach, you’ve already built a prototype. You believe in learning by doing, and you’d rather ship something imperfect on Tuesday than something polished next quarter.
• Social Confidence: You’re comfortable presenting to a room of executives, demoing to a skeptical customer, or whiteboarding with engineers you just met at a partner company—often in the same day. You build trust quickly and communicate with clarity and conviction. People want to work with you.
• Decisive Under Ambiguity: You thrive without a playbook. You can assess a messy situation, make a call, and course-correct without drama. You don’t need consensus to act, and you don’t need a manager to tell you what to do next.
• Collaborative Leadership: You’ll be partnering closely with R&D teams at each portfolio company—people who know their product and customers deeply. You need to earn their trust, respect their expertise, and bring them along on the journey. You lead through influence, not authority.
• Hunger: You want to build something that matters, not just collect a paycheck. You see this as a launchpad—not a landing pad.

What You’ll Do

• Own top-of-funnel customer discovery across Fluent’s portfolio: engage directly with users, identify high-value pain points, and surface monetizable AI product ideas.
• Prioritize ruthlessly—manage the product idea pipeline based on customer value, business potential, and speed to market.
• Prototype fast: move from concept to working, demoable AI-powered product in 2–3 days using AI-enhanced dev tools and third-party AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure AI, Gemini).
• Lead live POCs and product demos with customers and stakeholders—then iterate based on what you hear.
• Partner with each portfolio company’s R&D team to take validated prototypes into production—bridging your AI product vision with their domain expertise and infrastructure.
• Be the change agent: champion AI adoption across the portfolio and help teams see what’s possible.

Technical Skills

• Full-Stack Fundamentals Comfortable building end-to-end: modern frontend frameworks (React, Vue.js, TypeScript), server-side development (Node.js, Python, or C#/.NET), REST/GraphQL APIs, and relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL). You don’t need to be an expert in every layer, but you need to be able to stand up a working, demoable product without waiting on another team.
• AI & Agentic Development Hands-on experience integrating AI model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Azure Cognitive Services) into real products—not just toy projects. Experience building agentic workflows: multi-step AI agents using function calling, tool use, and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel). Strong RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) skills: building pipelines that ground AI in domain-specific customer data using vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate) and embedding models. Fluency in prompt engineering, token/cost management, and latency tradeoffs in production AI features.
• Tools & Velocity Proficiency with AI-enhanced development tools (Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, bolt.new, v0, Replit)—and the instinct to adopt whatever’s next. You’re the person who knows about new releases before anyone on the team. Git, CI/CD, and agile workflows. You ship, you iterate, you don’t over-process.

Qualifications

• 1–6 years of professional experience in software development, product development, or applied AI—but we care more about what you’ve built than how long you’ve been building.
• Demonstrated ability to take an idea from concept to working prototype independently.
• Deep fluency in the AI tooling ecosystem—and the habit of staying current. You’re the first to know when a new model drops, a framework ships a breaking change, or a tool emerges that changes the game.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills—you’re as comfortable in a customer meeting as you are in a codebase.
• A track record of self-directed work: side projects, freelance products, hackathon wins, or entrepreneurial ventures carry significant weight.
• Bonus: experience in SaaS, vertical market software, or early-stage startup environments.

What This Role Is Not

This is not a role where you’ll receive a detailed spec and build to order. There is no established playbook. You won’t have a large team reporting to you on day one—you’ll be partnering with teams across the portfolio, not managing them. If you need heavy structure, extensive process, or prefer to stay heads-down in code without customer interaction, this isn’t the right fit. If the ambiguity excites you—keep reading.

Why Fluent

• Founder-track opportunity: This role is designed to grow into a product leadership position. As the product scales, your scope and title scale with it.
• Skin in the game: Compensation includes meaningful participation in the product’s success—because we want you building like an owner, not an employee.
• Built-in distribution: You’re not starting from zero. Fluent’s portfolio gives you established customer bases, domain expertise, and revenue to build against.
• Direct impact: Your work will be visible to customers and leadership from day one, with real usage across live products.
• Autonomy by design: We hire self-starters and get out of their way.
• AI-first culture: We’re building a center of excellence around AI integration and are committed to responsible, value-driven adoption.
• Collaborative ecosystem: Work alongside passionate teams across Fluent’s portfolio who bring deep vertical expertise and genuine enthusiasm for what AI can unlock.

If you’ve read this far and you’re already thinking about what you’d build first—we want to talk to you.

Key skills/competency

• AI Product Development
• Rapid Prototyping
• Full-Stack Development
• Generative AI
• Customer Discovery
• Product Vision
• Entrepreneurship
• API Integration
• Agentic AI
• Vertical SaaS