Product Manager, Platform

Perplexity•San Francisco, CA

1d•$230,000 - $330,000

About The Position

This role focuses on understanding the needs of teams using our platforms and the customers who depend on them. The Product Manager will identify and solve high-impact problems by analyzing product data, operational feedback, and quality issues. A key responsibility is to transform recurring needs into shared services, tools, and workflows that minimize duplicated effort, requiring judgment on when to build reusable capabilities, leverage existing solutions, or adopt simpler approaches. The role involves close collaboration with product, engineering, and operational teams to understand their workflows, pinpoint recurring problems, and anticipate future needs. The Product Manager will prioritize platform investments across new product enablement, reliability, efficiency, and technical debt, making clear tradeoffs between short-term delivery and long-term flexibility. Success will be measured through business impact, reliability, cost to serve, and reduced manual work, directly linking these to customer and business outcomes. This includes partnering with engineering on technical tradeoffs, build-versus-buy decisions, and rollout plans, as well as writing clear requirements and driving delivery from problem definition through launch and iteration.

Requirements

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.

Nice To Haves

Systems thinker, detail-oriented, problem solver. This person needs to have experience wrangling thorny, complex problems.
Experience working on platforms with multiple stakeholders and non-trivial tradeoffs.
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.

Responsibilities

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.