Senior Product Manager, Platform

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Own the roadmap for your area of the platform, from problem definition through launch and adoption, and decide what ships, what waits, and what gets deprecated.
• Collaborate on product strategy: what keeps developers from adopting Viam, and which experiences become bottlenecks or blockers.
• Develop a view on where physical AI and robotics are heading, and what that means for how software engineers get involved.
• Work with engineering leads on the decisions that shape platform architecture, like what belongs in the core, in the registry, or in an SDK.
• Take new capabilities from 0 to 1 and stay on them through real customer deployments.
• Own the developer experience for your area, including SDK ergonomics, API surface, docs, and onboarding.
• Define success against developer adoption and second activations, and use that to decide what to build next and what to cut.
• Bring what you learn from customers and Forward Deployed engineers back into the roadmap, and build the product practice itself as you go.

Job requirements

• Experience as a software engineer, building and shipping production software used by real users, plus 8+ years in product management since. The engineering background is a requirement, not a preference.
• Experience building developer-facing or infrastructure products like APIs, SDKs, or platforms, where the user is an engineer.
• A track record of taking products from ambiguity to production, including migrations, deprecations, and breaking changes that real customers depend on.
• Technical credibility with engineers. You can run the SDK yourself, read the code well enough to ask the right question, and hold your own in a design review.
• Ability to do real market research and form a product strategy from it, rather than execute one handed to you. This includes time spent directly with users in their own environment.
• Comfort defining success metrics and using data to decide what to build next.
• Ability to move quickly, decide with incomplete information, wear whatever hat the week requires, and change direction when the evidence changes.
• Experience working with senior leadership, including setting direction and disagreeing well.