Director, Product Management, Platform Services

Medallia•Mclean, VA

3d•Remote

About The Position

Medallia is a leader in Experience Management, utilizing its SaaS platform, Medallia Experience Cloud, to manage experiences, insights, and actions across various sectors. The company focuses on creating positive memories and fostering environments where organizations are loved by their customers and employees. This role is within the Data and AI Platform organization, specifically focusing on Reporting Data Processing pipelines and Text Analytics. The Director of Platform Services will own the end-to-end domain of proprietary data processing pipelines, the Text Analytics platform, applied ML model portfolio, GenAI experiences, and the administration and configuration for scalability. This is a people leadership role where the individual will build and grow a team of product managers, providing coaching and strategic direction. The role involves acting as a player-coach, setting long-term strategy for Core Platform capabilities like Text Analytics while directly managing high-impact and ambiguous areas. The team's scope includes TA platform modernization, applied ML models (Action Intelligence, Sentiment, Themes), and GenAI and admin experiences. The work will significantly influence platform scaling, modernization from legacy architecture, and integration with broader AI and GenAI features. Close collaboration with Engineering, Data Science, Design, Reporting, and Apps product teams is essential for a cohesive customer experience.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in a science, engineering, or related quantitative field, or equivalent experience.
10+ years of enterprise SaaS research and development experience (product, engineering) focused on data, analytics, NLP, or ML/AI products and services.
3+ years of direct people-management experience leading product managers, including hiring, coaching, and developing a team.
Demonstrated experience owning a complex technical platform or product domain end to end, from strategy through delivery.
Demonstrated understanding of natural language processing, text analytics, or machine learning models, including how they are built, evaluated, and maintained.
Demonstrated experience driving cross-functional initiatives across product, engineering, and data science or research.
Ability to align local working hours with US East Coast business hours for a minimum of 3 days per week for real-time leadership meetings, cross-functional synchronization, and team management.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading text analytics, NLP, or applied machine learning products at enterprise scale.
Experience modernizing a legacy platform or re-architecting a system for scale and performance while maintaining reliability.
Experience with GenAI and large language model applications, including topic modeling, summarization, classification, or agentic experiences.
Experience partnering with Data Science and Research teams to productionize ML and GenAI capabilities, including evaluation, annotation, and quality frameworks.
Familiarity with multi-language and localization considerations for AI and text analytics features.
Player-coach leadership style: able to set strategy and develop people while remaining hands-on in the most complex areas, and comfortable with ambiguity.
Experience with a Customer Experience Management platform.
Experience in an agile development environment and familiarity with tools such as Productboard and JIRA.

Responsibilities

Own the long-term strategy, roadmap, and standards for ETL data processing and Core Platform Services across platform, models, and admin experiences, ensuring scalability, extensibility, and alignment with AI and GenAI use cases.
Build, lead, and develop a team of product managers as a player-coach: hire, coach, set direction, and remove bottlenecks, while directly owning the most complex and ambiguous problem areas.
Drive platform modernization, including the architectural evolution of the legacy architecture and improvements to throughput and scalability.
Break components such as our Text Analytics out of the core application so its topics and models can be applied to data wherever it lives, extending its reach to other Medallia products and AI agents rather than a single application.
Own the applied machine learning portfolio for Analytics, including Action Intelligence, Sentiment, Themes, and hybrid rule and ML topic modeling, and the productized approach to building, maintaining, evaluating, and updating these models.
Own the GenAI and administrative experiences on the Analytics stack, including Smart Topic Builder, Themes with GenAI, topic and rule tooling, and the configuration and admin surfaces that make our platform usable at scale.
Set enterprise standards for pipeline scalability, performance, retention, and governance across products and integrations, including sensitive-data handling, governance, and consistency.
Partner with the language and translation function to extend Text Analytics and GenAI features into new languages, including native versus translated processing and repeatable extension frameworks.
Partner with Data Science and Research to operationalize model development, evaluation, annotation, and quality measurement, and to move research into production reliably.
Define and enforce quality, evaluation, and non-functional requirements for Analytics features before general availability, not after.
Collaborate cross-functionally with the AI Platform, Data Platform, Reporting, Integrations, and Apps product teams to ensure consistent behavior and a coherent customer experience across the platform.
Represent the Platform and Analytics team to senior leadership, customers, and go-to-market teams, translating a complex technical domain into clear strategy and priorities.
Oversee day-to-day management for a globally distributed team spanning US Pacific to Eastern Europe, while participating in cross-functional syncs and executive reviews to align product strategy across time zones.