Product Manager, Platform

Overview

At App Folio, we're building an AI‑Native Performance Platform. This is our unified system that transforms data into real performance for our customers. Central to that mission is our Data Streaming Platform: the foundation that powers every insight, automation, and intelligent experience across our products.

Define the Data Platform Vision
:
Build and evolve the strategy for App Folio's next‑generation data architecture, spanning ingestion pipelines, transformation frameworks, data quality, and query services.

Enable Intelligent Systems
:
Power capabilities across Realm‑X, Flows, Performers, and Performance Insights by ensuring unified, high‑quality, and real‑time data access.

Empower Builders
:
Partner with internal development teams to deliver self‑service data tooling, documentation, and APIs that reduce cognitive load and accelerate innovation.

Drive Data Quality and Governance
:
Establish consistent standards for lineage, observability, and accuracy to ensure confidence in every decision powered by App Folio product data.

Collaborate Cross‑Functionally
:
Work closely with Engineering, Data Science, Security, and Product leaders to align priorities and deliver platform capabilities that scale.

Measure Impact
:
Define and track key outcomes such as data freshness, latency, and adoption of data APIs and frameworks, using these insights to continuously improve.

You’ve shipped platform products that other developers depend on. You understand the difference between building features for end‑users and building capabilities that enable other builders. You know platform adoption is earned, not mandated.

You think in systems and second‑order effects. When someone proposes a change, you immediately map dependencies, blast radius, and migration paths. You see how solving one problem might create three others – and you design to prevent that.

Engineers forget you’re a PM. You can read schema definitions, debug API responses, write SQL queries, and understand why eventual consistency matters. You don’t need to write production code, but you need to understand the technical constraints engineers work within.

You balance urgency with pragmatism. You know when to ship the 80% solution that unblocks teams today versus when to hold out for the right architecture. You use  strangler fig  patterns instead of big rewrites.

You make data‑driven tradeoffs. You define metrics that matter (not vanity metrics), run experiments before big bets, and adjust course based on what adoption data tells you – not what you wish were true.

You communicate technical complexity to non‑technical stakeholders. You translate latency budgets into business impact, schema versioning into customer value, and observability gaps into risk decisions executives can make.

We care more about what you've accomplished than credentials. If you've shipped products that developers love and can discuss architectural tradeoffs intelligently, we want to talk regardless of your formal education or exact years of experience. Here’s some experiences of yours we’d love to hear about from you:

• You've built data platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure products that serve internal teams
• You've worked in modern data stacks (Kafka, Flink, dbt, Trino, Graph
  
  QL, data mesh architectures)
• You have experience designing APIs, data contracts, or schema management systems
• You've overseen implementing governance at scale without creating bureaucracy
• You've managed platform migrations while keeping production systems running
• You have a background in data engineering, distributed systems, or software development

This is a multiplier role. You won't build features for end‑users. You'll build the foundation that makes every other team at App Folio faster. When you succeed, hundreds of developers ship better products. When you fail, the entire company moves slower.

You’ll define how App Folio builds for the next decade. The patterns you establish, the tooling you create, and the culture you foster around data will shape every AI agent, every API, and every customer experience we deliver.

If you've been…