Peter Bittner

AI product manager, AI engineer, and AI coach.

Seattle, WA (remote) ·peter@peterbittner.com

AI product manager and builder. I own two platforms at Advance Local, a self-service layer hundreds of automated jobs run through and a reusable embed system, and I ship and operate them across 9 markets. Before that I built a measurement platform alone that collected ~1.35M AI responses a month across six AI engines, as an in-house alternative to the commercial tooling category. I founded an AI education company and taught more than 500 professionals.

Stack

Languages and frameworks

TypeScript · JavaScript · Python · Node · Next.js · React · Astro

Cloud and data

AWS Amplify · AWS Lambda · AWS S3 · AWS CloudFront · DynamoDB · PostgreSQL · Prisma · Snowflake · SQL · DigitalOcean

AI and orchestration

LLM and search APIs · MindStudio · Claude and Claude Code · prompt and agent design · evaluation harnesses · retrieval and semantic search

Automation and collection

Playwright · Apify · managed headless browser sessions · scheduled jobs and cron pipelines · RSS pipelines · Google Apps Script

Publishing and tooling

Arc XP · python-pptx · PptxGenJS · GitLab · Git · Notion · Figma

Selected builds

Editorial AI platforms

Advance Local · April 2026 to present · Product and engineering. Wrote the PRDs and wrote the code.

• Self-service feed and notification platform. Automations were accumulating one at a time, each with its own owner, alerting, and failure mode, and none discoverable by anyone who had not built it. A registry so jobs are discoverable, subscriptions so consumption is opt-in rather than broadcast, SSO so access is not a spreadsheet, and digests so output arrives where people already look.
• Reusable embed system. Every data-driven story rebuilt its own interactive from scratch. One authoring path from raw data to an embeddable single-page app to a published article, so the tenth embed costs a fraction of the first.
• Operate the fleet: model migrations across a live fleet, with rollback criteria defined before the migration; cost and performance tuning as a standing concern rather than a project; production debugging, including stale function versions raising alerts for work that had already succeeded.
• Scope: 9 markets plus topical publications, hundreds of automated jobs, and hundreds of RSS sources mapped to reporter beats.

Full case study

GEO and AI visibility measurement platform

Independent consulting engagement, March 2026 to June 2026. Client: a national consumer communications agency, under NDA. Role: product lead, methodology designer, engineer, security owner, client liaison.

• Scaled monitoring to 50+ concurrent brands and 2,500+ tracked prompts running 3 times daily, roughly ~225K prompt executions and ~1.35M collected AI responses per month, across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode.
• Built the platform as an in-house alternative to commercial GEO tooling in the Ahrefs, Semrush, Similarweb, Profound, Airops, Peec.ai class, including a headless-browser collection layer on Playwright, Apify, and managed browser sessions.
• Designed the measurement methodology end to end: prompt construction by topic cluster, engine coverage rules, run cadence, competitor set definition, and the metric definitions brands were scored against.
• Built citation and source mapping, competitive share of AI voice, and brand descriptor tracking, and reported all three to brand and agency stakeholders.
• Wrote the PRDs, user stories, and acceptance criteria for each reporting release, and made the roadmap calls on scope and sequencing.
• Shipped in production on Next.js, Prisma, PostgreSQL, Playwright, Apify, and owned the security posture: private repository handling, credential hygiene and secret rotation, two-factor enforced onboarding, documented least-privilege server access, handoff runbooks.

Full case study

Experience

Founder

The AI Upgrade · Remote · December 2022 to 2026

• Founded an AI education company, later co-founded with Kris Krüg, and taught more than 500 professionals across five course tracks.
• Designed and delivered AI training for marketing, communications, newsroom, and engineering teams, including C-suite sessions. Participants came from Apple, Salesforce, Walmart, AMD, Adobe, Amazon, Accenture, PayPal, NASA, US State Department, among others.
• Built the curriculum, the certification and capstone model, the faculty, and the client relationship.

Full case study ·83 testimonials

Co-Founder and Product Lead

MedSchool Copilot · May 2023 to present

Head of Community Success

Reach (formerly HappsNews) · May 2020 to July 2022

• Fifth employee
• Co-founded by CNN's former Head of Content
• Led 100x user growth from 0 to 30,000+ monthly active users
• Contributed directly to a $5M funding round
• Increased subscription revenue by more than 60 percent via the creator CMS strategy
• Partnerships with Reddit, the Knight Foundation, news organizations, music labels

Community & Communications Manager

News Product Alliance · June 2022 to October 2023

Visiting Lecturer, Graduate School of Journalism

University of California, Berkeley · October 2017 to present

• Designed and taught "The Future of Visual Storytelling"
• AI content in the curriculum since 2019
• Also taught at Berkeley's Advanced Media Institute
• Former visiting instructor, CELSA-Paris Sorbonne

Freelance Journalist and Communications Consultant

Peter Bittner Media & Communications · May 2017 to present

Creative Arts Fellow

The Fulbright Program · October 2018 to November 2019 · Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Communications Consultant

Wildlife Conservation Society · February 2018 to May 2018

Videographer and Video Editor

Canada C3 · September 2017 to October 2017

Human Rights Center Fellow

UC Berkeley School of Law · May 2017 to September 2017

Communications Coordinator (GSR)

UC Berkeley Blum Center for Developing Economies · August 2016 to December 2016

Editorial Assistant and Correspondent

The Diplomat · May 2016 to September 2016

• 25 text, photo, and video stories
• Interviewed Mongolian President Elbegdorj and Foreign Minister Purevsuren

Education

• Master of Journalism (New Media), University of California, Berkeley, 2015 to 2017
• BA, International Political Economy (Spanish minor), University of Puget Sound, 2007 to 2012. Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa
• Spanish, Universidad de Granada, 2010

Certifications

• Product Manager Certificate, Product School
• MindStudio Certified Developer
• Google Analytics Certified
• Community MBA, CMX
• 2022 Fulbright U.S. Student Alumni Ambassador

Honors

• Fulbright Creative Arts Fellow, U.S. State Department (Mongolia, 2018-2019)
• Fulbright Alumni Ambassador, U.S. State Department
• Human Rights Center Fellow, UC Berkeley School of Law (Mongolia, 2017)
• Google Digital Media SXSW Fellow
• Best Student Multimedia Journalism Project (David Teeuwen Award), Online News Association
• 1st Place, Big Ideas Contest, UC Berkeley
• Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE), Journalism
• AlumniTIES Grantee, "Climate Change & Digital Media", U.S. State Department
• Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund Winner, U.S. State Department
• ARC Fellow in New Media, UC Berkeley Arts Research Center
• Knight Foundation Environmental Reporting Grant
• American Center for Mongolian Studies Field Research Fellowship
• Institute of East Asian Studies Summer Research Fellowship, UC Berkeley
• Krista Colleague for Global Citizenship Service Grant
• Slater/Herlinger Phi Kappa Phi "Love of Learning" Scholarship
• International Political Economy Department Academic Excellence Award, University of Puget Sound
• President's Scholarship, University of Puget Sound

Languages

English (native), Spanish (professional working), Mongolian (limited working).