Product Owner (Product and Project Management)
Full-time · Starting October 2026 · San José, Costa Rica · www.UptechSoft.com
Join the founders who invented rental car tolling as they rebuild it, AI-first. As our Product Owner you'll own the requirements and the plan for your part of the platform, and see your work in production within weeks.
About Uptech
We invented rental car tolling. Our founders built the platform that processes 300M+ transactions a year at what is now Verra Mobility, the dominant player in the space. Uptech is their second company in this industry, built from scratch to replace what they built 20 years ago.
We connect directly with US toll authorities, match every toll and citation to the right vehicle and driver, and handle the billing that follows for rental car companies, trucking companies, and the fleets that run them. At the core, we're a data company solving a mobility problem: every number has to be accurate, auditable, and traceable, or none of this works.
Self-funded by choice. Signed enterprise customers, a live fleet running on our platform today, and a hyper-growth stage where priorities move when a customer or a toll authority moves them, sometimes in the same week.
How We Work
The team is small, the founders are in the room, and decisions happen in a meeting, not a committee. Nobody has a narrow job here: everyone picks up what needs doing, including work nobody has done before. If you want a defined career ladder and a stable scope, you'll be happier at a larger company. If you want to see your work in production within weeks and help shape how a company is built, you'll like it here.
AI Is How We Work
Our whole product and engineering flow runs on AI. Business requirements become product requirements, reviews and specs through Claude Code, and engineers build from them with AI agents. That means using a chat window in a browser is not enough. We expect you to already work in Claude Code (or a comparable agentic tool) every day. AI-enhanced, not AI-dependent: you use it to move faster, but you know when its output is wrong, and you can show us how you use it..
The Role
This is a two-part role: half product owner, half project manager.
• As product owner, you own the requirements for your part of the platform, from a business requirements document to a PRD an engineer can build from, and you stay with the build until it ships.
• As project manager, you own the plan for that work: what engineering builds next, in what order, and whether it is on track.
Why both? Planning sits with the product team because the product team is closest to the business. Engineers see the part they’re building. Someone has to see what the business needs this month, sequence the work to match, and keep the pieces that different engineers build fitting together as one system. Without that, good engineering time goes to work that can wait.
Who you'll work with
• Founders and Operations are your main stakeholders. The founders set the vision and the business direction, and you'll work with them directly to understand the business reason behind what we build.
• You'll report to our Senior Product Manager, and also support our Director of IT and Systems, who owns a second product line.
• This role will change as the company does: the work you do in month three may look nothing like month one.
What You Will Do
• Own PRDs and requirements documents for your area, precise enough that an engineer can build from them without coming back to ask.
• Plan the engineering work for your area: break it into a sequence, agree the priorities with the Senior Product • Manager and the founders, track progress, and raise a slip before it becomes a missed date.
• Keep the work across engineers connected, so what different people build fits together and nobody works on something the business does not need yet.
• Answer engineering questions while the build runs, decide what changes, and keep PRDs and requirements in step with every decision.
• Work with operations to understand how they handle tolls and citations today, bring their problems into the product, and make sure what we ship works for them.
• Research what the work needs: how a toll authority's system works, what a competitor offers, what the data says about a customer's fleet. Read toll-authority technical specifications and pull out what our system has to do to comply.
What We Are Looking For
At least three years in product ownership, product management, or business analysis close to engineering, including time planning and tracking delivery for an engineering team. You understand both sides: the business reason something is being built, and the technical shape it has to take. You're comfortable reading an API spec, a data file layout, or a database table, and you can talk to engineers in their terms as easily as you can talk to operations.
Bilingual, English and Spanish or Portuguese. Our team, our BRDs, and our specs are in English, and you need to work in it daily, not just read it. You write clearly in English, since most of your work is documents other people build from.
You're smart, professional, and ambitious: someone founders and customers alike would want in the room. You're comfortable with ambiguity and with priorities that change when a customer does.
Nice to Have
• Experience in SaaS, or a specialized industry such as logistics, transportation, fleet management, payments, or supply chain.
• Direct experience with tolling, traffic violations, or rental car operations.
• Tools, scripts, or AI workflows you built yourself to make your own work faster.
• Scrum or another agile delivery framework, or a project management certification.
Location
Remote from San José, Costa Rica to start. We may open an office in Costa Rica in the future, and we're looking for people who would enjoy working in person/hybrid with the team if we do.
What to Expect Early On
The pace is high. You won't make a visible impact in your first two weeks, and we don't expect you to; that time is for learning the business. After that, you'll be trusted with real work quickly.
