Principal Product Manager, Content Services & API
About The Position
Condé Nast is hiring a technical Product Manager to own the strategy and roadmap for its content services: the REST Content API, GraphQL Content Service, GraphQL Federated Gateway, Content API Search, and Games Service. The role brings the needs of consuming teams into a shared roadmap and clarifies priorities, API contracts, and service expectations. The position owns product direction across content models, schemas, search, federation, performance, reliability, and developer experience. It requires understanding how service decisions affect editorial tools, the audience platform, mobile apps, and brand delivery, and balancing shared capabilities against use-case-specific flexibility. The Product Manager partners with engineering on architectural choices, including service boundaries, schema evolution, gateway behavior, and migrations. Engineering owns technical design and implementation; the Product Manager brings sufficient technical depth to challenge proposals and make informed product decisions. This is an individual-contributor role responsible for aligning teams around a shared platform direction. The role works closely with the Copilot PM, who owns the editor-facing product, and the Audience Platform PM, who owns the front end. The position is based in New York, NY.
Requirements
- Track record of owning technical products, APIs, or shared platform services from discovery through delivery and adoption, and ability to explain strategy, tradeoffs, and outcomes.
- Technical depth in API design, REST, GraphQL, schema evolution, and versioned contracts; ability to read API specifications, inspect payloads, and challenge proposed designs.
- Demonstrated systems thinking, including mapping dependencies across services and teams and using upstream and downstream effects to inform product decisions.
- Architectural judgment and meaningful contribution to decisions involving distributed systems, service boundaries, federation, caching, indexing, or data consistency; ability to explain alternatives and rationale.
- Production experience with scalability and reliability, including understanding the impact of traffic, query patterns, bottlenecks, and dependency failures on latency, availability, and cost.
- Experience improving developer integration, documentation, or onboarding, and demonstrating reduced friction or increased adoption.
- Experience leading API changes or platform migrations, including managing compatibility, deprecation, and rollouts across multiple consuming teams.
- Strong communication and product judgment, including writing clear requirements and decision documents, aligning teams with competing needs, and explaining technical tradeoffs to business stakeholders.
- Hands-on analytical ability using API tools, logs, dashboards, or SQL to investigate problems and test hypotheses with technical partners.
- Experience defining useful platform metrics and using them to make investment decisions, connecting service health and developer productivity to customer and business outcomes.
- Understanding of structured content, metadata, taxonomy, content relationships, and publishing lifecycles.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with a CMS, headless content platform, or digital asset system.
- Experience serving multiple brands, markets, or products from shared infrastructure, particularly in media or publishing.
- Direct experience with GraphQL federation, content search, or services consumed by both web and mobile applications.
- Experience prototyping or delivering AI-enabled retrieval, content enrichment, or developer tools, with a clear approach to evaluation and controlled access.
Responsibilities
- Understand the integration workflows, recurring workarounds, and unmet needs of Copilot, Verso, mobile, and brand engineering teams, and translate findings into shared capabilities and a roadmap.
- Trace content from creation and ingestion through modeling, indexing, retrieval, and delivery; map service dependencies and ownership; and assess consumer, freshness, permissions, and failure impacts before making changes.
- Participate in architectural discussions with engineering about REST and GraphQL, federated schemas, service boundaries, and data access patterns; evaluate build, buy, and evolve options and make product tradeoffs explicit.
- Define service expectations with engineering and consuming teams, balancing latency, availability, throughput, content freshness, and cost while planning for traffic peaks, query complexity, rate limits, and dependency failures.
- Set direction for API schemas, versioning, backward compatibility, and deprecation; improve search and retrieval, documentation, examples, onboarding, and error behavior.
- Define baselines and targets for latency, errors, availability, content freshness, search quality, cost to serve, integration time, adoption, and support burden; use these measures to prioritize and evaluate platform improvements.
- Sequence platform improvements and migrations across consumers while maintaining production health; clarify ownership, dependencies, and rollout plans, and use pilots, compatibility checks, and rollback plans to reduce disruption.
- Apply AI to discovery, prototyping, and technical analysis; evaluate opportunities in content discovery, metadata enrichment, and developer tooling, defining quality, permissions, provenance, latency, and cost requirements.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
