Principal Technical Product Manager, Content Platform

Arc XP•DC-TWP Remote Office, DC

2d•$131,500 - $219,100

About The Position

Arc XP is a cloud-based digital experience platform that helps enterprise companies, retail brands, and media and entertainment organizations create and distribute content, drive digital commerce, and deliver powerful multichannel experiences. A division of The Washington Post, Arc XP has powered the digital transformation of customers across the globe, currently serving more than 1,500 sites in 25 countries that reach more than 1.5 billion unique visitors monthly. Built 100% on AWS, the Arc platform employs a microservice architecture with a headless, API-first approach to content management. All of our software teams use DevOps to deliver and maintain products. Our processes are lightweight, which allows our teams to innovate quickly to bring new ideas to market. New features and products are deployed to our customer base every day. We are looking for a Principal Product Manager who can shape the future of how content is created, structured, and delivered in an AI-native world. This role sits at the intersection of headless content management, intelligent automation, and platform strategy. You will own the product vision for our Content Platform, defining how AI capabilities are woven into the content lifecycle—from authoring and enrichment to orchestration and multichannel delivery. You'll work closely with our Content Creation, Cloud Platform, and Developer Experience teams to build the next generation of tools that empower both human creators and AI agents to produce, manipulate, and distribute content at scale. As a principal-level Product Manager, you'll operate as a fractional PM across several pods in the content platform space simultaneously, threading a coherent product thesis through related missions rather than going deep on any single pod's backlog. You'll set direction across those pods, mentor other product managers, and own the strategic narrative for where the content platform is going—not just the next quarter, but the next several years. This isn't about bolting AI onto an existing CMS. We're rethinking what a content platform looks like when AI is a first-class participant in the content supply chain, and we need someone who has a clear, opinionated vision for that future.

Requirements

10+ years in product management, with at least 5 years working on content platforms, headless CMS, or digital experience platforms.
Demonstrated experience defining and shipping AI-powered product capabilities (not just integrating third-party APIs, but thinking through how AI changes workflows, data models, and user expectations).
Deep familiarity with headless/decoupled content architectures, content modeling, and API-first platform design.
Experience setting product strategy at the principal or staff level, including mentoring other PMs and shaping how the broader product organization operates.
Experience operating within an empowered product team model, partnering closely with engineering and design through continuous discovery and iterative delivery.
Daily, hands-on use of AI-powered tools (LLMs, coding assistants, research agents, etc.) to materially accelerate your own product work—PRDs, research synthesis, competitive analysis, data exploration, and rapid prototyping. You should be able to point to specific workflows you've reinvented around AI, not just tools you've tried.

Nice To Haves

BA/BS or equivalent practical experience. Advanced degree welcome but not required.
Strong understanding of modern content management paradigms: structured content, headless delivery, COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere), content-as-a-service.
Working knowledge of AI/ML concepts as they apply to content—including generation, classification, enrichment, summarization, and agentic workflows.
Comfort operating in an AI-first team culture where AI tools are expected to be part of how you think, write, analyze, and ship—not a novelty, but a core part of the workday.
Proven ability to translate a forward-looking technical vision into a concrete, prioritized roadmap.
Track record of operating as a fractional PM across multiple empowered pods at once, framing each pod's work as a sequence of small, hypothesis-driven bets that compound into a larger thesis—not as long, fixed-scope programs with distant delivery dates.
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and to articulate a compelling product narrative.
Grounded in lean product development principles: hypothesis-driven development, rapid experimentation, validated learning, and outcome-over-output thinking.
Experience with news, media, or publishing platforms (understanding editorial workflows, content velocity, and audience-facing delivery).
Experience with Platform as a Service (PaaS) product development empowering developers to build on top of your platform.
Familiarity with LLM orchestration frameworks, AI agent architectures, or content-aware AI pipelines.
A portfolio or examples of how you've used AI to meaningfully accelerate your own product management work (we'll ask about this in interviews).
Experience leading B2B and B2B2C platform products.
Background in cloud-native, serverless, or microservice architectures on AWS.
Experience representing a company in industry standards bodies or working groups (e.g., IAB Tech Lab, W3C), particularly around content monetization, syndication, or AI/agent access standards.
Experience shipping subscription or paywall products — pricing, metering, entitlements, or churn/retention work for digital content platforms.
Background in advertising technology (programmatic, header bidding, ad ops, or ad-serving integrations) and how platform architecture exposes inventory and signal to drive revenue.

Responsibilities

Define the long-term vision and product strategy for Arc's Content Platform, establishing how AI transforms content creation, management, orchestration, and delivery.
Lead the evolution of AI-native content capabilities by identifying opportunities to embed intelligent automation throughout the content lifecycle while balancing customer needs with long-term platform strategy.
Drive the evolution of Arc's content architecture, APIs, and platform capabilities to support both human creators and AI-powered systems.
Build and maintain a strategic product roadmap that sequences foundational platform investments, AI capabilities, and developer experience improvements to maximize customer value.
Partner with engineering, design, and customer-facing teams to define requirements, evaluate technical approaches, prioritize investments, and deliver platform capabilities through iterative product development.
Align product direction across multiple Content Platform, Cloud Infrastructure, and Developer Experience pods, ensuring initiatives reinforce a unified product vision and measurable customer outcomes.
Champion AI-first ways of working by applying AI tools throughout product discovery, planning, research, analysis, and prototyping while helping establish best practices across the product organization.
Represent Arc XP with customers, industry partners, and standards organizations to influence emerging content platform and AI standards while translating industry direction into product strategy.
Build strong feedback loops with customers, developers, internal stakeholders, and go-to-market teams to continuously refine platform direction and strengthen customer outcomes.
Define success metrics, monitor platform performance, identify strategic risks, and communicate product progress and investment priorities to executive leadership.