Staff Product Manager, Platform

We’re looking for a Staff Product Manager to lead the teams responsible for our data pipelines, data query infrastructure, and data engineering capabilities. This is a highly technical and strategic role. You’ll define how AppFolio collects, transforms, stores, and serves data to power products like Realm-X, AI Agents - Performers, Performance Insights, and Query APIs. You’ll partner with platform engineering, architecture, and data science to deliver the scalable, trusted, and performant data foundation that makes our AI-native experiences possible.

What You’ll Do

Define the Data Platform Vision: Build and evolve the strategy for AppFolio’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 AppFolio 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, GraphQL, 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

The compensation that we reasonable expect to pay for this role is: $152,000 - $190,000 [base pay / OTE]. The actual compensation for this role will be determined by a variety of factors, including but not limited to the candidate’s skills, education, experience, and internal equity.

Please note that compensation is just one aspect of a comprehensive Total Rewards package. The compensation range listed here does not include additional benefits or any discretionary bonuses you may be eligible for based on your role and/or employment type.

Regular full-time employees are eligible for benefits - see here.

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

You’ll define how AppFolio 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 looking for a role where technical depth meets strategic impact, where your decisions compound across an entire engineering organization, and where you can see the leverage in your work, well this is it.