Lead Platform Manager (Tech Foundations)

• Airbnb is a vision- and mission-driven company
• Our Product Managers embody this culture and mindset
• They imagine the ideal end state for our community (guests and hosts) and work backward from it, challenging current assumptions
• They champion winning strategies, leverage metrics to track progress, and partner with talented cross-functional teammates (engineering, design, data science, and more)
• Highly hands-on, they are never afraid to roll up their sleeves to deliver the right outcome for our community
• If you’re excited to help us create a world where anyone can belong anywhere, we’d love to meet you
• As a Lead Product Manager for Developer Productivity, you will own the product areas developers rely on, and you will own something harder: the end-to-end workflows that determine how productive our engineers actually are
• Those workflows cross organizational boundaries — a single developer journey can touch other parts of the infrastructure, reliability, developer experience, and security
• Your job is to understand the end-to-end developer journey, find where it breaks, and drive the work to fix it whether or not the fix lives in your teams
• You will define what developer productivity means at Airbnb, instrument it, and be accountable for moving it
• In collaboration with business stakeholders, product marketing, and technical program managers, you will help shape the roadmap for these products, with an emphasis on bringing together disparate offerings into a cohesive infrastructure roadmap
• This will include the creation and ownership of Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) and Business Requirements Documents (BRDs) to inform technical decisions
• You will also partner with engineers, designers, data scientists, and field-operations teams to scale our solutions across existing and emerging business segments, ensuring a cohesive system view
• A Typical Day:
• Establish product vision and northstar for your area, and connect it into the broader developer productivity strategy
• Own cross-cutting developer workflows end to end — mapping where they break across pillars like App & Cloud Infra, Reliability Engineering, and Developer Experience, and driving the changes that improve them
• Define how we measure developer productivity: build the metrics, instrumentation, and qualitative research that tell us whether engineers’ lives are actually getting better
• Partner with Engineering, Product, TPM, and Data Science to understand goals and establish success criteria with clearly measurable objectives and key results
• Develop the product roadmap, and get alignment on prioritization and timelines to meet business goals
• Influence teams you don’t own — build the case, bring the data, and get other groups to prioritize developer productivity work alongside their own roadmaps
• Develop a deep understanding of how Airbnb’s engineers work day to day, and of the technical architecture underneath, to build and improve products that fit into real workflows rather than around them
• Execute efficiently to ship products and deliver impact for our business and users
• Lead cross-functional groups to fulfill the team’s mission, acting as the system voice
• Communicate concisely and influence outcomes at all levels of the organization, demonstrating strong executive presence

Benefits

• Paid volunteer time
• Health food and snacks
• Generous parental and family leave
• Learning and development
• Annual travel and experiences credit- Ability to understand immediate and longer-term customer goals and needs, and build products that meet them
• Track record of improving developer or engineering productivity, with the measurements to prove it
• Experience defining and operationalizing metrics for hard-to-quantify outcomes — when quantitative metrics are needed and matter, and when qualitative metrics may or may not be more impactful
• Ability to quickly absorb technical concepts and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical partners at every level of the organization
• Familiarity with developer productivity research and frameworks (DORA, SPACE, DevEx) is a plus
• Storytelling skills that connect the problem you’re solving to a compelling vision, coupled with a willingness to dive into the details
• Ability to prioritize and scope user requests and platform capabilities, balancing long-term vision against short-term pain points
• Demonstrated ability to drive outcomes across organizational boundaries without direct authority — influencing roadmaps you don’t own
• Previous experience as a software engineer, or working extremely closely with engineering teams, is a strong plus
• 10+ years of product management experience building tools and platforms for technical users — developer tooling, infrastructure, or platform products
• Entrepreneurial drive, and demonstrated ability to lead and influence cross-functional teams to align on a vision and product strategy
• Strong understanding of technical architecture for complex and highly scalable systems, and of modern AI-powered developer workflows: AI-assisted development, code review, CI/CD, build systems, testing, deployment