Principal Product Manager, Machine Learning Platform

Job Title

Job Description

About The Position | Major goals and objectives and location requirements

We’re seeking a Principal Platform Product Manager to drive the evolution of our internal platforms that power content discovery and publishing experiences across People Inc.'s 30+ brands, reaching over 100M users monthly. This role sits at the intersection of engineering excellence and product strategy—focused on building scalable, reusable ML-enabling services that accelerate development velocity, reduce duplication, and improve consistency across teams.

As a senior IC partner to engineering and data science leadership, you’ll define and champion the roadmap for foundational capabilities such as search, recommendations, vector-based retrieval, and LLM enablement. You’ll ensure these platform services are robust, performant, well-documented, and widely adopted. Success requires balancing thoughtful product curation, long-term architectural coherence, and tactical developer needs.

This role reports to the VP of Product, Core Platform, and collaborates closely with Data Services and Platform Engineering leadership to ensure we’re solving the right problems with the right strategic focus.

Hybrid 3x a week- (New York, NY) 

In-office Expectations: This position is hybrid in-office, with the ability to work remotely for up to 2 days per week.

About The Positions Contributions:

Weight Accountabilities, Actions and Expected Measurable Results:

Strategic Roadmapping

• Define and maintain a platform roadmap aligned with company-wide goals and engineering priorities.

• Prioritize investments that reduce redundant work, improve developer satisfaction, and unlock new end-user capabilities.

• Make deliberate tradeoffs—focusing as much on what not to build as what to include to preserve platform coherence.

• Act now not later, move with urgency while staying aligned to the long-term vision.

Platform-as-a-Product Thinking

• Champion the platform as a product, not just a set of tools—requiring careful, opinionated curation.

• Avoid the “feature shop trap” by recognizing patterns in requests and designing extensible, self-service capabilities. 

• Promote modularity, standardization, and reusability across services to reduce fragmentation and technical debt.

• Deliver with intention, by thoughtfully balancing user problems with platform coherence.

Cross-Org Orchestration

• Lead multi-team initiatives for search, recommendations, content enrichment, and LLM infrastructure.

• Serve as the connective tissue between platform engineering, infrastructure, data science, and consuming teams.

• Collaborate respectfully to align stakeholders around shared technical outcomes.

Internal Developer Experience

• Treat internal developers as primary customers—improving API usability, documentation, and onboarding.

• Build trusted, self-serve services with intuitive interfaces and strong feedback loops.

• Make it matter by solving real developer pain points with empathy and insight.

Migration Strategy & Adoption

• Experience designing compelling migration paths and driving adoption of new platform capabilities.

• Ability to incentivize teams to adopt platform services through demonstrable value through efficiency, reliability, or new functionality.

• Support teams throughout the transition process to reduce total cost of ownership.

• Champion accountability in getting teams successfully onto future-proof platforms.

Operational Excellence

• Partner with engineering to ensure platform reliability, stability, and performance.

• Champion SLOs, observability, and self-healing capabilities as foundational product attributes.

• Avoid operational burden falling to users by proactively addressing edge cases and failure modes.

• Expect integrity in how we build, test and scale platform services.

Measurement & Outcomes

• Define and track platform leverage metrics—e.g., engineering hours saved, duplicated work eliminated, system uptime.

• Balance platform health metrics with adoption, developer satisfaction, and impact to end-user outcomes.

• Build feedback loops to continuously iterate on platform capabilities.

Innovation Enablement

• Identify and prioritize future-facing opportunities like vector search and LLM-ready APIs.

• Serve as a force multiplier by enabling faster, more innovative delivery across the org.

• Embrace change to grow–pioneer forward-thinking technical capabilities that empower teams.

The Role’s Minimum Qualifications and Job Requirements:

Education: Bachelor’s degree required in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or related field and/or equivalent experience.

Experience:  7+ years in product management including experience delivering ML-powered platforms.

Specific Knowledge, Skills, Certifications and Abilities:

• Strong understanding of search and/or recommendations systems, vector databases, and LLM application patterns.

• Proven success leading technical products that span multiple teams or business units, ideally in media, content, or developer-focused domains.

• Experience designing and driving adoption of migration strategies and self-serve capabilities.

• Deep fluency in partnering with engineers on architecture, tradeoffs, and system design.

• Ability to balance strategic thinking with empathetic customer insight—translating stated needs and revealed preferences into impactful solutions.

• Track record of avoiding reactive build cycles by thoughtfully prioritizing platform focus and extensibility.

• Exceptional collaboration and communication skills—able to influence without authority and align cross-functional stakeholders.

• Familiar with Agile development processes and modern experimentation practices.

It is the policy of People Inc. to provide equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, the Company will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. Accommodation requests can be made by emailing [email protected].

The Company participates in the federal E-Verify program to confirm the identity and employment authorization of all newly hired employees. For further information about the E-Verify program, please click here: https://www.e-verify.gov/employees

Pay Range

The pay range above represents the anticipated low and high end of the pay range for this position and may change in the future. Actual pay may vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to work location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of People Inc's total compensation package for employees. Other compensation may include annual bonuses, and short- and long-term incentives. In addition, People Inc. provides to employees (and their eligible family members) a variety of benefits, including medical, dental, vision, prescription drug coverage, unlimited paid time off (PTO), adoption or surrogate assistance, donation matching, tuition reimbursement, basic life insurance, basic accidental death & dismemberment, supplemental life insurance, supplemental accident insurance, commuter benefits, short term and long term disability, health savings and flexible spending accounts, family care benefits, a generous 401K savings plan with a company match program, 10-12 paid holidays annually, and generous paid parental leave (birthing and non-birthing parents), all of which may vary depending on the specific nature of your employment with People Inc. and your work location. We also offer voluntary benefits such as pet insurance, accident, critical and hospital indemnity health insurance coverage, life and disability insurance.