Technical Product Manager

Who you are

• Deep, hands-on engineering background - this role must be staffed by someone who has shipped production systems, not someone who has only managed backlogs
• Strong commercial instinct: can build a business case, speak to P&L impact, and hold a line on ROI
• Exceptional stakeholder management across product, engineering, and finance without direct line authority over all of them
• Comfortable with ambiguity - platform value is often indirect and long-horizon
• Track record of contributing as an IC while operating at a senior, cross-team level
• Proactive, low-ego, and clear communicator - able to hold a line with leadership and pod leads alike
• Experience in platform, infrastructure, or developer tooling contexts
• Familiarity with SLA/SLO frameworks and incident management at scale
• Experience enforcing CI/CD standards across multiple teams or pods
• Prior work making "invisible" infrastructure legible to non-technical leadership

What the job involves

• We're building a larger, dedicated Platform team at Lendable to reinvest in infrastructure after a deliberate trade-off earlier in the year prioritised new product development
• Platform work has been largely invisible to leadership, and without commercial and prioritisation accountability it's been hard to prioritise effectively or connect engineering effort to customer and revenue outcomes
• That's changing. We're hiring a Technical PM to sit within engineering and own the intersection between platform infrastructure and commercial value - not a traditional feature PM, not a people manager and not a project manager: you set priorities, not schedules
• The TPM is a commercially accountable IC who owns platform stability and outcomes, embedded in the engineering team
• The core tension you'll resolve: platform engineers make decisions without enough business context; product teams don't always understand what platform work enables or what it costs to defer it. You own both sides of that translation
• This is an IC role with hands-on technical contribution expected, writing code, reviewing PRs, participating in architecture design
• That credibility with senior engineers isn't optional; it's how the role works
• You'll partner closely with the Platform Engineering Manager (who owns people and delivery) and the Platform Tech Lead (who owns technical direction and standards)
• You set what we build and why; they set how the team runs and how it's built
• You and the EM are tightly coupled and work from one shared roadmap: you set and sequence priorities, the EM commits capacity and delivery against them
• Own platform stability as a primary accountability - SLA/SLO metrics, incident rates, release quality
• Hold release gating authority: block features from production that don't meet testing standards or introduce unacceptable regression risk
• Enforce CI/CD standards centrally so pods don't fragment into one-off solutions
• Track and report stability metrics alongside commercial outcomes - stability is the foundation that makes the rest possible
• Own the business case for platform investment and answer "why are we spending six engineers on this for three months?" in terms leadership understands
• Track platform impact in business terms: developer velocity, incident cost, time-to-market, reliability, capacity - e.g. "CXO rollout removes a 3-second API fan-out, reducing session abandonment" or "we can now handle 20k simultaneous logins"
• Input into headcount and investment decisions for the platform team
• Own the platform backlog, prioritised by business value and sequenced to unblock the highest-value product teams first - not driven by technical debt or engineer preference alone
• Make trade-offs explicit: "if we do X now, we defer Y by Z weeks - here's what that means for products depending on us"
• Ensure every initiative has a defined success metric that non-engineers can track
• Act as the single point of contact for Pod Leads: business requirements coming from pods and engineering/developer requirements flowing to pods; prioritise both in service of platform stability
• Make platform work visible to leadership - regular forums with product MDs and PMs to capture upcoming dependencies before they become blockers; represent platform work in leadership reviews; translate technical milestones into business milestones
• Drive cross-team collaboration and buy-in with other PMs; engage architecture in technical design
• Escalate when product teams make requests that would create unsustainable platform load or technical debt
• Write code, review PRs, and participate in architecture design as a core part of the role - not a side project
• Bring a strong technical voice to roadmap decisions without owning final architecture calls (that's Architecture and Tech Leads)
• Our tech stack:
• Platform & backend: Kotlin, AWS, Postgres, RabbitMQ, Docker, Kubernetes
• Gateway & clients: Node GraphQL gateway, React Native / TypeScript mobile app, Relay
• Tooling & observability: GitHub, GitHub Actions, Jira, Confluence, Datadog, Sentry, Grafana

The application process

• Quick call with the Talent Team (30 minutes)
• Hiring manager interview (30 minutes)
• Technical and Product interview (90 minutes)
• Culture-add interview (60 minutes)

Benefits

• 💸 Best-in-class compensation, including equity
• 🏠 You can work from home every Monday and Friday if you wish - on the other days we all come together IRL to be together, build and exchange ideas (hybrid)
• 🍲 Our in-house chefs prepare fresh, healthy lunches in the office every Tuesday-Thursday
• 🏥 Comprehensive private health insurance (including dental, optometry and general wellbeing)
• 🚗 EV car scheme (Octopus)
• 🚲 Cycle to work scheme
• 🧮 Pension
• 🌴 25 days of annual leave - excluding bank holidays
• 🎊 Multiple opportunities to socialise with your team and the wider company
• 🏋️‍♀️ 50% off gym memberships at Virgin Active and Nuffield (via Vitality health insurance)
• 💻 Equipment provided for you to do your best work!