About the role
You'll own the deliverability surface of Saleshandy's product. That's the layer that decides whether a customer's cold email actually lands in the inbox or not. It sits between our sending infrastructure (the engineers operating MTAs, which are the server systems that actually send the email, plus IP pools and warmup systems) and our customers (sales teams who don't want to think about SPF records but care a lot about reply rates). Your job is to translate one to the other and ship the product surface that makes deliverability legible and actionable for them.
This is a product role, not an engineering role. You'll partner with the deliverability engineering pod, but you won't be writing the code that sends the email. You will be the person who can read a raw SMTP transaction, diagnose why a campaign tanked, and turn that diagnosis into a feature.
The hardest part of this role is the depth gap. Deliverability is one of the most technical product domains in SaaS, and customers will ask questions that 80% of PMs can't answer. You need to be the 20%.
Typical candidates have 2-4 years of experience in a technical product, infrastructure, or deliverability-adjacent role. We hire on demonstrated technical fluency, not tenure or degree.
What you'll do
- Own the deliverability product roadmap: inbox-placement testing, domain warmup, blacklist monitoring, SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup wizards, sender-reputation dashboards, and the diagnostic tools customers use when something goes wrong.
- Read the data yourself. Pull Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS feeds, read DMARC aggregate reports, debug a failing SMTP handshake from log lines.
- Run a weekly user-research loop with heavy senders and the customer-success deliverability specialists. Turn the patterns you hear into shipped product changes.
- Sit in the room when there's a deliverability incident (an IP pool gets a complaint spike, a domain ends up on a major DNSBL, a mailbox provider tightens a filter). Co-own the response with infra engineering and translate the technical reality into customer-facing communication.
- Define and track the deliverability metrics that matter: inbox-placement rate, sender score, complaint rate, bounce rate, deliverability-driven churn, and deliverability-related ticket volume.
- Use AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, and similar) as a daily part of how you research protocols, draft specs, debug logs, and analyze data. Speed and technical depth compound when AI is in the workflow.
What we're looking for, must have
- Strong SMTP and IMAP protocol fluency. You can read a raw SMTP transaction, explain what each command and response means, reason about MX records and message routing, and debug a failed handshake from logs. This is the one technical area we will not train from scratch.
- Demonstrable computer-science or technical-systems fundamentals. By degree (IT or CS), structured coursework, certifications, or a portfolio of technical work. Degree path matters less than whether you can think in protocols and systems.
- A curiosity bias toward how email actually works under the hood. You've already gone down the rabbit hole on at least some of: SPF / DKIM / DMARC, Postmaster Tools, sender reputation, or IP warmup. You won't know all of it, but you've started.
- Direct user-research muscle. You've personally talked to users (or beta testers, classmates, customers in a previous role), synthesized what you heard into a shipped change, and can show the line from a conversation to a release.
- AI-fluent in your daily work. You already use Claude Code, Cursor, or comparable tools to research, draft, analyze, and ship faster, and can describe specific workflows where AI compressed your cycle time.
What we're looking for, nice to have
- Working familiarity with sending infrastructure (IP pools shared vs dedicated, MTAs like Postfix or Haraka or PowerMTA, warmup curves, throttling).
- Hands-on with SPF, DKIM, DMARC, or BIMI setup for any domain, even a personal one.
- Has read Google Postmaster Tools or Microsoft SNDS data for a real sending domain.
- Comfort writing SQL or pulling data from product-analytics tools without an analyst.
The product surface you'll own
The deliverability layer of Saleshandy: domain and IP warmup, inbox-placement testing, blacklist and reputation monitoring, SPF/DKIM/DMARC configuration flows, the deliverability diagnostic and reporting surface that customers see, and the internal tooling the customer-success deliverability specialists use to help customers. Your day-to-day touches raw protocol logs, Postmaster Tools and SNDS data, customer support transcripts, and the experimentation tooling.
About the team
You'll join Saleshandy's product org and embed at the seam between the deliverability engineering pod (the team running the sending infrastructure) and the customer-success deliverability specialists (the team helping customers debug their sending). You'll partner closely with the Outreach Growth PM since deliverability gates everything the Outreach product ships. The next two quarters are focused on three things: lifting inbox-placement metrics on Saleshandy's sending pools, shipping the customer-facing deliverability diagnostic surface, and reducing the volume of deliverability-related support tickets.
Why this role
Purpose: Deliverability is the silent factor that decides whether every Saleshandy customer's outreach campaign works or not. A 5% lift in inbox placement across the platform is more revenue impact than most product features will ever ship. Owning this layer means owning the thing that everything else depends on.
Growth: Deliverability is one of the most defensible specializations in SaaS product management. The pool of PMs who genuinely understand SMTP, email auth, and mailbox-provider behavior is tiny, and the demand from every email-sending company on the planet is large. One to three years of focused depth here sets you up for senior TPM and Head-of-Deliverability roles for the rest of your career.
Motivators: This role is built for someone who'd rather spend an afternoon reading an RFC than skim a "10 PM frameworks" Medium post. If you find it satisfying that a single misconfigured DKIM record can tank a million-dollar campaign and you want to be the person who finds it, this is your seat.
