Lead Platform Manager, Tech Foundations

Candidate; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Airbnb is seeking a Lead Product Manager for Developer Productivity to own end-to-end developer workflows across infrastructure, reliability, and developer experience. You will define what productivity means for engineers, instrument it, and collaborate with stakeholders to shape a cohesive platform roadmap.

You will partner with engineers, data science, and TPMs to scale solutions across business segments, driving measurable impact.

Qualifications

• Proven track record in product management for technical users and developer tooling.
• Experience defining metrics and measuring impact for productivity improvements.
• Strong understanding of architecture for scalable systems and AI-powered workflows.
• Ability to influence roadmaps across teams without direct authority.
• Demonstrated delivery of high-impact end-to-end developer experiences.

Responsibilities

• Define the product vision and northstar for developer productivity.
• Own end-to-end developer workflows spanning infrastructure, reliability, and DX.
• Measure productivity with metrics, instrumentation, and research.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, TPM, and data science to shape the roadmap.
• Prioritize initiatives and influence cross-team roadmaps to drive impact.
• Understand engineers’ day-to-day work to build integrative products.
• Lead cross-functional groups and communicate with executives.

Skills

Product management

Developer tooling

Platform products

Infrastructure

Metrics definition

AI workflows

Cross-functional leadership

Effective communication

Job description

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The Community You Will Join

Airbnb is a vision- and mission-driven company. Our Product Managers embody this culture and mindset. They imagine the ideal end state for our community (guests and hosts) and work backward from it, challenging current assumptions. They champion winning strategies, leverage metrics to track progress, and partner with talented cross‑functional teammates (engineering, design, data science, and more). Highly hands‑on, they are never afraid to roll up their sleeves to deliver the right outcome for our community. If you’re excited to help us create a world where anyone can belong anywhere, we’d love to meet you.

The Difference You Will Make

As a Lead Product Manager for Developer Productivity, you will own the product areas developers rely on, and you will own something harder: the end‑to‑end workflows that determine how productive our engineers actually are. Those workflows cross organizational boundaries — a single developer journey can touch other parts of the infrastructure, reliability, developer experience, and security. Your job is to understand the end‑to‑end developer journey, find where it breaks, and drive the work to fix it whether or not the fix lives in your teams.

You will define what developer productivity means at Airbnb, instrument it, and be accountable for moving it. In collaboration with business stakeholders, product marketing, and technical program managers, you will help shape the roadmap for these products, with an emphasis on bringing together disparate offerings into a cohesive infrastructure roadmap. This will include the creation and ownership of Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) and Business Requirements Documents (BRDs) to inform technical decisions. You will also partner with engineers, designers, data scientists, and field‑operations teams to scale our solutions across existing and emerging business segments, ensuring a cohesive system view.

A Typical Day

• Establish product vision and northstar for your area, and connect it into the broader developer productivity strategy
• Own cross‑cutting developer workflows end to end — mapping where they break across pillars like App & Cloud Infra, Reliability Engineering, and Developer Experience, and driving the changes that improve them
• Define how we measure developer productivity: build the metrics, instrumentation, and qualitative research that tell us whether engineers' lives are actually getting better
• Partner with Engineering, Product, TPM, and Data Science to understand goals and establish success criteria with clearly measurable objectives and key results
• Develop the product roadmap, and get alignment on prioritization and timelines to meet business goals
• Influence teams you don't own — build the case, bring the data, and get other groups to prioritize developer productivity work alongside their own roadmaps
• Develop a deep understanding of how Airbnb's engineers work day to day, and of the technical architecture underneath, to build and improve products that fit into real workflows rather than around them
• Execute efficiently to ship products and deliver impact for our business and users.
• Lead cross‑functional groups to fulfill the team’s mission, acting as the system voice.
• Communicate concisely and influence outcomes at all levels of the organization, demonstrating strong executive presence.

Your Expertise

• 10+ years of product management experience building tools and platforms for technical users — developer tooling, infrastructure, or platform products
• Track record of improving developer or engineering productivity, with the measurements to prove it
• Experience defining and operationalizing metrics for hard‑to‑quantify outcomes — when quantitative metrics are needed and matter, and when qualitative metrics may or may not be more impactful
• Strong understanding of technical architecture for complex and highly scalable systems, and of modern AI‑powered developer workflows: AI‑assisted development, code review, CI/CD, build systems, testing, deployment
• Demonstrated ability to drive outcomes across organizational boundaries without direct authority — influencing roadmaps you don't own
• Ability to understand immediate and longer‑term customer goals and needs, and build products that meet them
• Entrepreneurial drive, and demonstrated ability to lead and influence cross‑functional teams to align on a vision and product strategy
• Ability to quickly absorb technical concepts and communicate effectively with technical and non‑technical partners at every level of the organization