Platform Product Manager

About Frontiers

At Frontiers, our purpose is simple yet ambitious: to make science open. We believe open science empowers the global scientific community to accelerate discovery and develop the solutions needed for healthy lives on a healthy planet.

We are one of the world's largest and most influential open-access research publishers. Every article we publish is peer-reviewed and quality-certified, ensuring research is accessible to everyone, everywhere. To date, Frontiers research has been viewed over 4 billion times, demonstrating the real-world impact of science without barriers.

Joining Frontiers means being part of a global, mission-driven organization at the intersection of science, technology, and innovation — working alongside passionate colleagues who care deeply about advancing knowledge for the benefit of society. To learn more about our impact and culture, please watch this video.

The Mission

At Frontiers, we are rewriting the rules of scientific publishing. Behind every product team sit theshared technical services that the whole publishing platform depends on. Today these are Identity & Access Management (IAM) and Messaging (transactional email and GDPR-compliant consent) — representative examples of this kind of shared service, with the portfolio expected to grow over time. They are owned by our Platform Shared Services team, and we are looking for a Platform Product Manager to own their strategy and roadmap.

This is not an end-user product role. Your customers are Frontiers' own engineering teams (and, increasingly, the services and agents they build): you run IAM and Messaging as products, measured by adoption, developer experience, reliability, integration time, security posture and cost— not user-facing metrics. You'll form a delivery triad with the team's Platform Engineering Manager and Senior Engineers: you own the What and Why, they own the How.

The Technical Context

You will own the roadmap for the team's shared-service lines — today IAM and Messaging.

• IAM: OAuth 2.0 / OIDC (Ory Hydra), JWT authorization, fine-grained authz via a Permission API (Ory Keto), Azure APIM at the edge, OAuth client tooling, shared .NET libraries.
• Messaging: transactional/outreach email at scale (SendGrid, Mailgun), templating and A/B testing, deliverability (Everest, Uriports, Postmaster, SNDS), and a central GDPR consent authority (Subscription Management).
• Core stack: C#/.NET services on Microsoft Azure + Kubernetes (AKS); event-driven with RabbitMQ and Kafka; SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch.
• Contracts as the product: REST + async APIs, JWT shape and scopes, consent semantics, versioning and backward compatibility — high blast radius, consumed org-wide.
• Observability & AI: New Relic, Prometheus/Grafana; the sub‐department's AI-First Delivery tooling (Cursor, MCP, the Technology Framework as executable context) is available to the team.

What You'll Do

• Own and evolve the roadmap for IAM and Messaging — prioritising against internal engineering demand, security/compliance requirements and platform scalability, and slicing big initiatives into iterative, valuable releases.
• Turn engineering needs into clear specs and a prioritised backlog— translate requirements from stream-aligned teams into well-shaped work (PRDs/SDDs in git, following our Spec-Driven / AI-First Delivery practice).
• Co‐design with engineering— work lock‐step with the Platform Engineering Manager and Senior Engineers on architecture trade‐offs, API contracts and service‐level requirements. This needs genuine technical fluency, not just businessengineering translation.
• Own the service/API lifecycle— versioning strategy, deprecation planning and backward‐compatibility decisions for services many teams depend on.
• Be the primary point of contact for internal "customers" integrating with IAM and Messaging — a developer‐facing product function: discovery, onboarding, support model, and a feedback loop that actually changes the roadmap.
• Define and track success metrics— adoption by internal teams, reliability (SLAs/SLOs), integration/time‐to‐first‐call, security posture, and cost.
• Partner with Security, Architecture and Infrastructure— ensure IAM and Messaging meet compliance and security standards (OAuth/JWT, GDPR consent) and stay aligned with the Technology Framework.
• Communicate roadmap, trade‐offs and priorities clearly to engineering leadership and stakeholder teams — manage expectations transparently, including a tactful, well‐reasoned "not now".
• Experience: 5+ years in Technical / Platform Product Management or engineering leadership, a significant portion in technical, platform, or developer‐facing product roles.
• Platform‐as‐a‐product mindset: you build for internal engineering customers, not end users, and can prioritize a technical roadmap