Principal Product Manager - Golden Path Platform

First American•Santa Ana, CA

6d•Remote

About The Position

This role involves owning the product strategy for Golden Path, First American's internal developer platform, which serves as the primary path for engineering teams to build, deploy, and operate software across the enterprise. The target customers are engineers, and the roadmap is influenced by security, compliance, and infrastructure constraints, as well as feature requests. Success is measured by platform adoption, driven by its ability to simplify engineers' work. This is a platform product role, not a feature factory role, requiring the balancing of needs from dozens of engineering teams, navigating enterprise architecture and information security requirements, managing cross-organizational dependencies, and making difficult tradeoff decisions with limited resources. Remote candidates are considered for this position.

Requirements

Proven platform product leadership experience, having owned an internal developer platform, infrastructure product, or developer tools product at scale.
Experience as the strategic owner, not a supporting PM.
Demonstrated success in driving adoption across skeptical engineering teams.
Experience managing platform roadmaps with 20+ consuming teams.
Experience making difficult prioritization calls in high-pressure situations.
Deep technical fluency, comfortable in architecture discussions around Kubernetes, IAM, CI/CD, cloud networking, database connectivity, and infrastructure-as-code.
Experience working closely with infrastructure and platform engineers, understanding constraints to make trusted decisions.
Executive-level communication and presence, with experience representing a platform organization to VPs and CTOs.
Ability to frame tradeoffs for leadership decision-making.
Skill in saying no to priorities without creating conflict.
Ability to own a narrative across multiple stakeholder groups with competing interests.
A track record of operating in complexity, juggling concurrent program migrations, multi-cloud strategies, security/compliance constraints, and cross-organizational dependencies.
Ability to build, defend, and adjust a prioritized backlog based on reality.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, or similar infrastructure tooling.
Direct experience with engineering patterns spanning APIs, cloud networking, data lake architectures, and AI agents and integrations built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Background in financial services, healthcare, or other regulated industries where compliance and cybersecurity are embedded in every product decision.
Experience leading through organizational change, such as platform consolidation, team restructuring, or post-acquisition integration.

Responsibilities

Product strategy and roadmap for the Golden Path platform (Kubernetes-based, multi-cloud, supporting hundreds of microservices across cloud providers).
Prioritization across competing demands including migrations, platform connectivity, multi-cloud buildout, developer experience improvements, and security/compliance requirements.
Stakeholder alignment with VP-level engineering leaders, enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, and program management.
Developing the product narrative, including weekly updates, tradeoff communication, escalation management, and decision documentation.
Product Discovery board management, ensuring every idea is framed as a problem with a customer, impact, and measurable outcome.