Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
### Why this Role is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Platform product leadership roles sit at the center of modern SaaS, and this one is explicitly about the technical substrate that other products and teams build on. With ownership spanning AI platform capabilities, core engine and infrastructure, and SDKs, it reflects a mature SaaS environment where developer experience, scalability, and internal leverage are primary product outcomes rather than byproducts.
For a SaaS product leader, the career value here is the opportunity to deepen platform thinking that transfers across API-first businesses: setting strategy for shared services, managing trade-offs between internal velocity and customer constraints, and shaping extensibility for a wide range of downstream use cases. The remit also touches emerging AI and retrieval infrastructure, offering exposure to how SaaS companies adapt their foundations to support new product paradigms.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
We are seeking an experienced Director of Product to lead our Tech Platform organization - a flagship role critical to Algolia's future. This position oversees three teams spanning multiple geographies:
- AI Platform: Accelerates the iteration speed of AI development at Algolia
- Engine & Infrastructure: Provides a scalable, developer-friendly API platform to accelerate innovation and ensures our infrastructure scales to support all customers and feature development
- Platform SDK: Makes it easy for Algolia developers to build and extend solutions using our infrastructure
You'll be responsible for the platform that powers both our current search capabilities and our future agentic infrastructure. The Tech Platform accelerates internal development and ensures our infrastructure scales seamlessly across customers of all sizes - from small businesses to large enterprises. This is the backbone that will power everything we run live at Algolia, including our evolution into the agentic world.
YOUR ROLE WILL CONSIST OF:
- Lead and bridge teams across geographies: Manage and mentor product managers in Europe and Australia (approximately 30% management, 70% IC work), ensuring effective collaboration across time zones and teams
- Define platform strategy and vision: Lead, define and communicate the strategy for the Tech Platform with executive stakeholders and teams across the organisation
- Drive the flagship platform forward: Own the trajectory, development, timelines, and delivery of major features for Algolia's core platform that powers search and future agentic capabilities
- Accelerate development velocity: Work across AI Platform, Engine & Infrastructure, and Platform SDK teams to maximize iteration speed and enable rapid feature development
- Identify platformization opportunities: Collaborate hand in hand with engineers and product managers from other teams to identify areas that can be platformised to maximise impact when building new capabilities
- Balance internal and customer needs: While primarily serving internal teams by building developer-friendly tools and infrastructure, maintain customer-facing responsibilities to understand infrastructure constraints and prioritise features based on business objectives
- Focus on scalability and extensibility: Ensure our infrastructure scales to support all customers while making it easy for developers to build and extend solutions
- Drive retrieval and agentic infrastructure: Lead our retrieval capabilities forward while anticipating and planning for infrastructure needs in the agentic world
- Master technical complexity: Understand the cloud and infrastructure landscape in-depth, working with engineering to define the most suitable technical solutions for our growing range of customers
- Communicate across all levels: Translate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders across the organization, including executive leadership
- Drive cross-functional collaboration: Work with engineering, design, product marketing, GTM sales, and customer support to help launch new products and support existing ones
- Build strategic partnerships: Develop alliances with third-parties to build a successful product at the best cost possible and identify new opportunities
YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF YOU HAVE:
- 7-10+ years of experience in product management, ideally building developer-first products with significant platform PM experience
- Management experience with IC focus: Background in PM Mentoring.
- Strong platform product management expertise: Proven track record building and scaling technical platforms that serve internal and external stakeholders, with experience in API platforms, SDKs, or infrastructure products
- Technical depth: 5+ years with multi-tier distributed architecture, enterprise software infrastructure, cloud technologies, and related systems
- Developer empathy: Deep understanding of what makes platforms and tools developer-friendly, with experience accelerating engineering velocity
- Executive stakeholder management: Demonstrated ability to communicate and influence at the executive level
- Outstanding communication skills: Ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, from engineers to GTM teams
- Relevant technology experience: Familiarity with search engines, ML/AI technologies, retrieval systems, and platform infrastructure
- Scale experience: Preference for candidates with experience at our current stage and beyond (over 10,000 customers, $200-500M ARR range, high growth, building internal infrastructure)
- Bonus: Experience writing code (for fun, college, or work)
This is a flagship position where you'll have a significant impact on Algolia's core technology and future direction. If you're ready to take on a critical, high-visibility role that balances strategic leadership with hands-on product work, we'd love to hear from you.
