Principal PM, API Platform

Shippo; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 179,000 - 243,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

Generous vacation policy

Work from home stipend

Learning stipend

Charity donation match

Team off-sites

Job summary

Shippo is seeking a Principal Product Manager to own the end-to-end platform (developer experience, onboarding, MCP, SDKs, and label service). You will shape API design standards and guide how APIs are built across the org to attract developers.

Collaborate with engineering leadership on architecture and drive developer-focused outcomes. You will work across product, engineering, and go-to-market to ensure the platform remains the reason developers choose Shippo for their API needs, while

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree AND 8+ years experience in product management, with a track record owning developer-facing or API-first products.
• Deep understanding of API design and developer experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the API platform roadmap: label creation, MCP, SDKs, and developer docs.
• Own MCP as a product: define ownership and evolution.
• Define and maintain platform standards for extending API surface.
• Set testing standards for integrations across carriers.
• Partner with engineering on architecture decisions and long-term tech investments.
• Lead developer experience initiatives: onboarding, docs quality, SDK coverage, MCP capabilities.
• Represent the platform in cross-team planning to ensure consistency with standards.
• Engage with developers and mid-market customers to identify friction and prioritize fixes.
• Provide product guidance and mentorship to other PMs.

Skills

API design

Developer experience

SDK strategy

Platform standards

Cross-functional leadership

Education

Bachelor’s Degree

Job description

At Shippo, our vision is bold and clear: we are the shipping layer of the internet. Our mission is to make every merchant successful through excellent shipping,delivering world-class logistics technology and infrastructure. We’re building the backbone of global e-commerce — connecting merchants to carriers worldwide through a single API and intuitive dashboard.

As a remote-first and globally distributed team , we believe flexibility fuels trust, autonomy, and performance. Our diverse perspectives — across continents, cultures, and time zones — drive our innovation and enable us to build solutions used by businesses everywhere. We invest in modern, scalable technology so our teams can build, ship, and iterate with confidence.

Your impact starts here: every person at Shippo plays a direct role in shaping the infrastructure that powers global commerce and makes shipping simpler for businesses around the world.

How we will deliver success together:

Shippo is looking for a Principal Product Manager to own our end to end platform: developer experience and onboarding, our MCP, SDKs, developer documentation, our label service, and standards how APIs are designed and developed across the org.

This role not only sets the standard for how our API platform evolves, but also how it evolves as customer needs, agentic commerce, and integration patterns change. You will work across product, engineering, and go to market to keep the platform the reason developers choose to build on Shippo instead of stitching together individual carrier APIs themselves.

You will partner closely with engineering leadership to set architecture and design standards for how new capabilities join the platform. You will be the voice for our developer audience: what they need from docs, from SDKs, from MCP support, and from the core label API everything else is built on.

• Own the API platform roadmap: label creation, MCP, SDKs, and developer docs.
• Own MCP as a product: define what ownership means, how it evolves, and how it fits alongside our other integration paths.
• Define and maintain platform standards other product teams use when extending the API surface, including teams building adjacent services like reporting APIs, EDD, and Autopilot.
• Set a clear, consistent standard for how developers are expected to test integrations across carriers.
• Partner with engineering leadership on platform architecture decisions and long-term technical investments.
• Build and maintain a clear point of view on developer experience: onboarding, docs quality, SDK coverage, and MCP capabilities.
• Represent the platform in cross-team planning so domain teams build in a way that is consistent with platform standards.
• Engage directly with developers and mid-market customers to identify integration friction and prioritize fixes.
• Provide product guidance and mentorship to other PMs building on the platform.

Your shipping requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree AND 8+ years experience in product management, with a track record owning developer-facing or API-first products.
• Experience setting technical or platform standards that other teams adopted.
• Deep understanding of API design, developer experience, and SDK strategy.
• Experience with MCP, agentic commerce, or LLM-driven integrations.
• Experience in shipping, logistics, or ecommerce infrastructure a plus.

What is in the Shippo Package?

• Healthcare coverage for medical, dental, and vision (90% covered by the company, incl. dependents). Pets coverage is also available!
• Take-as-much-as-you-need vacation policy & flexible workinghours
• One week-long company wide winter slow down
• WFH stipend to set up your home office
• Charity donation match up to $100
• Dedicated programs, coaching, tools, and resources for your professional and career growth as well as an individual learning stipend for your personal and focused growth
• Fun team in person time through our Shippos Everywhere program which includes regular team and company off-sites throughout the year as well as local Shippos gatherings

Compensation

Our Compensation Shippolicy:

We believe compensation is a custom experience and are commited to fair and equitable compensation practices. The standard base pay range for this role is min is $179k to a max $243k annual salary (we tend to anchor our offers at the mid point $211k). Since we are focused on hiring Shippos Everywhere, we have 2 US pay ranges, a standard compensation range for the majority of the US and a standard +1 compensation range for those who live in areas where the cost of labor is higher, such as NYC and California.

The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: financial budgets, work experience, training, transferable skills, business needs, and market value. The base pay salary ranges are subject to change and may be modified in the future. Total compensation for this role will include, equity, medical, dental, vision and other benefits noted in our Shippos “package” section.

Sail through the process:

Here at Shippo, we celebrate inclusivity and are committed to creating equal access to opportunities for people from all backgrounds, perspectives and geographies. These values define who we are and everything we do. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply. If you need assistance, or a reasonable accommodation during the application and recruiting process, please contact us at [e-mail]

Shippo s in the wild:

Our people, much like the packages we help ship, are all over the world. This means, through our remote-first program, “Shippos Everywhere”, our roles can be based anywhere in the US with the exception of Delaware, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Hawaii, New Mexico and West Virginia and many roles can be based internationally.

For locations outside of the US and Ireland, the employment contracts are powered by R ippling.com.