Technical Product Manager
HybridTempe, Arizona, United States
Job Summary
Own the product roadmap for platform health, search relevance, and site performance/latency, prioritizing against feature roadmaps. Partner with engineering on architecture and technical tradeoff decisions, translating infrastructure investment into business impact. In postmortems, distinguish whether incidents stem from missing non-functional requirements versus engineering execution issues. Define and track performance metrics like page speed, search relevance, and uptime, connecting them to conversion outcomes. Translate technical constraints into clear, business-readable priorities for leadership and manage cross-functional dependencies between engineering, data, and other product teams.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years of PM experience partnering directly with engineering on platform, infrastructure, or search initiatives
- 5+ years of professional engineering experience having worked as a software engineer writing and shipping production code - not solely in an adjacent technical role
- Demonstrated experience owning a technical roadmap against measurable KPIs (latency, uptime, conversion, etc.)
- Comfort in defining both functional and non-functional requirements for a team whose work, at times, may be heavily backend or hidden away from the UI
- Comfortable pulling and validating your own data without the use of a UI (via REST APIs and database queries)
- Familiarity with observability tools like DataDog
- Experience prioritizing platform/technical debt against feature work
- Bachelor's degree in a technical field (Computer Science, Engineering) or equivalent practical experience
- Proven examples of using AI to improve outcomes in prior roles is expected
Desired Qualifications
- eCommerce or high-traffic web platform experience is a plus!
- Experience with search/relevance systems (indexing, ranking, auto-suggest) - ideally with Elasticsearch or a comparable engine
- Exposure to marketplace, multi-seller, or B2B platforms
- Experience navigating cloud cost/performance tradeoffs, particularly on AWS
- Background in automotive, parts, or high-growth eCommerce
- Direct experience with relational databases at scale (e.g. Aurora MySQL/PostgreSQL), container orchestration (e.g. EKS/Kubernetes), and asynchronous messaging systems (e.g. queues, pub/sub)
- Web performance fundamentals (Core Web Vitals, caching/CDN strategy)
- Understanding of search/relevance systems and how they drive conversion
- Ability to read architecture diagrams and API specs
- Comfortable reading a pull request or codebase to understand behavior, without needing to write production code day-to-day
- SQL and REST API proficiency for independent data analysis
- Familiarity with observability/monitoring tools for SLAs and performance tracking (e.g. Datadog), ideally in AWS-based environments
- Ability to write technical tickets defining both functional and non-functional requirements and define use cases that may be purely technical in nature
- In incident and postmortem discussions, able to ask technically grounded root-cause questions and determine whether the issue traces to a requirements gap (e.g. unspecified non-functional requirement) or a known technical constraint — always tying findings back to customer impact
- Able to translate fluently in both directions — business needs into technical specs, and technical tradeoffs into business terms non-technical stakeholders can act on
- Comfortable pushing back on engineering with data, not just deferring
- Credible enough with staff/principal-level engineers to ask pointed technical questions and hold your ground, without needing to propose the solution yourself
- Bias toward measurable outcomes over feature output
- Strong cross-functional influence without direct authority
- Calm under ambiguity — platform and infrastructure work often lacks clean requirements
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