Product Manager, Operations Platform

About Arena Club

If you’re fascinated by sports cards and memorabilia, your search ends here. Arena Club is pioneering the collectibles domain by introducing the first-ever digital card show. Spearheaded by 5x World Series Champion Derek Jeter and serial entrepreneur Brian Lee, Arena Club has developed a fully digital marketplace. This innovative platform is built on trust, transparency, and fun, featuring grading & authentication, vaulting, and digital pack openings for collectors to build and showcase their collections in a personalized online showroom from anywhere in the world.

About The Role

We’re hiring a Product Manager to sit inside our Beaverton fulfillment center and own the internal systems that determine how fast, how accurately, and how cheaply we move product through our pipeline. You’ll partner directly with the Director of Operations and work across engineering and finance to build the operational backbone that supports Arena Club’s growth—not just in cards, but as we expand into new collectible categories and scale total volume.

A critical part of this role is buy-versus-build decision-making. For every operational need, you’ll evaluate whether to leverage AI agents and automation on top of existing systems, build custom software from scratch, or purchase off-the-shelf solutions with best-practice workflows already baked in. Getting this right is how we scale without bloating headcount or complexity.

What You Will Do

• Own the Internal Systems Roadmap: Define and prioritize all admin tooling—receiving/processing, scanning, grading, assembly, vaulting, inventory, inventory adjustments and shipping—in lockstep with the Director of Operations. Ensure systems are category-agnostic and built to handle new product types as we expand beyond cards.
• Scale Ahead of Growth: Design systems that meet our scaling forecast across two dimensions: increasing volume within existing categories and adding entirely new categories that introduce operational complexity. Build for where we’re going, not just where we are.
• Drive Buy vs. Build Decisions: Evaluate every operational need through the lens of build custom, buy off-the-shelf, or automate with AI agents. Own the analysis, make the recommendation (provide options) and execute the decision.
• Prototype with AI Agents: Use AI tools to rapidly prototype designs, MVPs, and workflow automations — validating concepts with the operations team through testing and iterating before committing engineering resources to full builds. 
• Eliminate Bottlenecks: Live on the operations floor, identify constraints firsthand, and ship workflow automation—barcode flows, routing logic, exception handling, quality checkpoints—that increases throughput and reduces error rates.
• Instrument Performance: Build dashboards and KPI frameworks—throughput per station, defect rates, SLA compliance, queue depths—that give leadership real-time visibility and you the data to prioritize what to fix next.
• Collaborate Across the Business: This is not a siloed role. You’ll work daily with operations, finance, buying, customer service and engineering to align systems investments with business priorities, cost targets, and technical architecture.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of product management experience with meaningful time spent on internal tooling, admin systems, or operations-facing products.
• Strong technical fluency—comfortable with backend architectures, APIs, data models, and workflow automation platforms.
• AI fluency is non-negotiable. You should, at minimum, be able to vibe code clickable prototypes, and ideally you’ve built or deployed AI agents to automate real workflows.
• Proven track record building internal systems that measurably improved operational throughput or efficiency.
• Data-driven with SQL proficiency and experience building or leveraging operational dashboards (Metabase, Looker, Retool, or similar).
• Exceptional cross-functional communicator—able to translate ops floor pain points into engineering specs and technical trade-offs into business language.
• Experience in fulfillment, logistics, warehousing, marketplace operations, or manufacturing environments strongly preferred.
• Lean certification or similar a plus 

The Arena Club Standard

Life at Arena Club isn’t for the faint of heart — and that’s by design. We’re building products and experiences the collectibles world has never seen. This is a proving ground. It demands your best every single day, because anything less means you’re falling behind.

From day one, you’re in the game. Trusted to deliver, expected to own outcomes, and driven to raise the bar higher than you thought possible. We don’t just execute — we innovate, compete, and win together.

If you want routine or predictability, you won’t find it here. But if you’re ambitious, relentless, and hungry to prove yourself on a team built to dominate — step into the arena. You’ll discover growth and reward here, unlike anywhere else.