Product Manager, Platform

Apply; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Apply is seeking a product leader to own strategy and execution for technical platforms used by multiple teams. You will translate team needs, identify high-impact improvements, and build reusable capabilities across billing, identity, developer tooling, and data platforms.

You will partner with product, engineering, and operations to balance near-term delivery with long-term flexibility, measuring impact through reliability, cost to serve, and user outcomes.

Qualifications

• Experience owning product strategy and execution on technical products/platforms used by multiple teams.
• Strong technical fluency to reason about APIs, data flows, and system dependencies.
• Strong analytical skills to define metrics and evaluate impact of investments.
• Excellent written and verbal communication to align teams on priorities.
• High ownership and judgment in fast-moving environments.
• Focus on customer outcomes and product quality, including internal users.

Responsibilities

• Own product strategy and execution for technical platforms used by multiple teams.
• Turn needs into reusable services, tools, and workflows to reduce duplicated work.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and operations to anticipate capabilities needed next.
• Prioritize investments across enablement, reliability, efficiency, and tech debt.
• Define success metrics and connect them to business outcomes.
• Drive requirements and delivery from problem definition through launch and iteration.

Skills

Product strategy

Technical fluency

Analytical skills

Clear communication

Ownership

Customer outcomes

Job description

What you’ll do

• Understand the needs of the teams that use our platforms and the customers who depend on them. Use product data, operational feedback, and recurring quality issues to identify the highest-impact problems, and then solve them.

• Turn recurring needs into shared services, tools, and workflows that reduce duplicated work. Exercise judgment about when to build a reusable capability, use an existing solution, or take a simpler approach.

• Work directly with product, engineering, and operational teams to understand their workflows, identify recurring problems, and anticipate the capabilities they will need next.

• Prioritize platform investments across new product enablement, reliability, efficiency, and technical debt. Make clear tradeoffs between near-term delivery and long-term flexibility.

• Define and track success through business impact, reliability, cost to serve, and reduced manual work, connecting these measures to customer and business outcomes.

• Partner closely with engineering on technical tradeoffs, build-versus-buy decisions, and rollout plans. Write clear requirements and drive delivery from problem definition through launch and iteration.

Qualifications

• Experience owning product strategy and execution on technical products and platforms, or shared systems used by multiple teams such as billing and monetization, identity and access, developer platforms, data and experimentation, internal tooling, support, etc.

• Strong technical fluency. You can reason about APIs, data flows, system dependencies, and failure modes, and work closely with engineers on consequential tradeoffs.

• Strong analytical skills. You can investigate problems independently, define meaningful metrics, and evaluate the impact of platform investments.

• Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to align teams around priorities and make difficult decisions when their needs compete.

• High ownership and sound judgment in a fast-moving environment. You are comfortable moving between long-term strategy and hands-on execution without adding unnecessary process.

• A focus on customer outcomes and product quality, including when your immediate users are internal teams.

Where this person needs to spike

• Systems thinker, detail-oriented, problem solver. This person needs to have experience wrangling thorny, complex problems. We need someone that is excited about diving into messy workflows, reading through dozens of support tickets, thinking through edge cases no one’s thought of, assuming different behavior across platforms, proactively considering enterprise vs. consumer workflows, etc.

• Experience working on platforms with multiple stakeholders and non-trivial tradeoffs. This person is building products simultaneously for customers, agents, and other internal employees.

• Is “AI-native.” Can build AI products whose outputs require evaluation, safeguards, and human-in-the-loop design.

• Strong analytical skills and experience defining metrics in ambiguity, breaking down workflows, and using quantitative and qualitative evidence to prioritize.

• Some experience working on critical software: support platforms/agents, legal/compliance tooling, identity and account tooling, billing, fraud, trust-and safety, etc.

• High-ownership. This person needs to feel dissatisfied by the current support flow, and hungry to do whatever it takes to clear the backlog.