About Dakota
Dakota Prep is building the future of skilled trades education. We create modern, AI-powered tools that help electricians, plumbers, and other tradespeople learn the trade, pass licensing exams, renew their licenses, earn certifications, and move forward in their careers.
So far, we’ve supported more than 20,000 learners across 80+ schools, unions, and training programs in the U.S. and Canada. We work directly with individual students and with the institutions that train them.
Our newest product is Dakota Labs. You can’t learn a trade from a textbook. You learn it by doing the work, getting it wrong, and figuring out why. But physical labs are expensive, bench time is limited, and most apprentices only get a few reps before they’re expected to do it for real. Dakota Labs is a simulator where apprentices wire, install and troubleshoot real circuits from any browser, as often as they want. We think every tradesperson should get the reps they need, wherever they are, and Labs is how we get there.
The role
We’re hiring a product engineer to grow and run our education products. Tradespeople need to learn new things constantly: to pass exams, renew licenses, earn certifications, get into the trade, and move up in it. Dakota is expanding from exam prep into that wider set of needs, and we need someone who can work out where the demand is and build the systems that turn it into new offerings at scale.
You’ll work closely with the founder, engineering, sales, and customers. You’re technical enough to build: you’ll ship real features with AI coding tools, read and reason about the codebase, and get your work through code review. You also have good design sense, enough to make clear interface decisions and ship something that looks and feels right without a designer in the loop. You don’t need to be an engineer by trade, but you should be able to go from “we should do X” to a working version of X.
The work falls into three areas:
Understanding demand. Figure out what learners, schools, unions, and employers need and will pay for. Which licenses and certifications are coming up for renewal? Where are programs short on capacity? What are tradespeople trying to learn to earn more? You’ll turn conversations, usage data, and market signals into a clear view of what to offer next.
Scaling new offerings. Build the pipeline that takes an offering from idea to paying learners: content sourcing, authoring, QA, packaging, pricing, enrollment, and launch. Each one should be faster and cheaper to ship than the last, because the system keeps improving.
Maintaining offerings at scale. Codes change, exams change, and content goes stale. You’ll own how our catalog stays accurate and healthy across licensing prep, consumer Dakota Labs, and everything we add, and how we use learner data to improve it over time.
What you’ll work on
- Demand research: who needs what, in which states and trades, and what they’ll pay
- The content and publishing pipeline, from subject-matter expert to live product
- Authoring and admin tools so the team can build and update offerings without engineering help
- Pricing, packaging, and enrollment flows
- Our licensing prep apps and the consumer Dakota Labs experience: growth, retention, pass rates, and keeping content current
- Analytics and experiments: defining the metrics that matter, instrumenting them, and using the results to decide what to build or retire
- Customer research with learners, instructors, and employers
What we’re looking for
- A talented generalist across product, engineering, and design. You make the product call, build it with AI coding tools, and ship software people use
- You’ve owned what got built and whether it worked, whatever your title. You’ve taken a product from zero to paying customers and can show us your decisions
- Strong instincts for demand and data. You know what people will pay for, and you instrument what you ship to tell real results from noise
- A bias for systems. When you see repetitive work, you build the workflow, and you can turn messy feedback into a prioritized plan
- Clear writing and respect for people who work with their hands. You don’t need trade experience, but you want to learn the domain
Nice to have
- Experience launching courses, curriculum, or other learning products
- Early-stage startup experience, or a founding product role
- An engineering background before moving into product
- A trade background, or family in the trades
- Edtech, workforce development, or B2B products sold to training organizations
- Experience building content pipelines, authoring tools, or internal admin systems
- Product design experience
