Sr. Product Manager, Technical

YPO is seeking an experienced Sr. Product Manager, Technical to lead the strategy, development, rollout, and lifecycle management of their API platform. This role involves owning the vision and execution for APIs that power YPO’s Member ecosystem, collaborating cross-functionally to design scalable API solutions that meet technical and governance standards.

Responsibilities:

• Define and own the API product vision, long-term strategy, and roadmap for the Members, Chapters, and Agentic Ecosystem API domains, aligning with YPO’s Digital Transformation goals and the V1 Trust Stack
• Identify opportunities to expand YPO’s API offerings to support new member products, data capabilities, agentic use cases, and integration partnerships
• Implement industry best practices in API-first product development — ensuring YPO’s APIs meet and exceed standards for scale, security, versioning, and developer experience
• Champion the Trust Stack principle: if backend data changes break the member experience, the API layer is not done
• Translate member, chapter, and agentic integration requirements into detailed product requirements, user stories, and API specifications
• Work closely with Engineering, Governance and Data Architecture to design GraphQL and RESTful API endpoints (via AWS API Gateway) including data models, versioning standards, authentication mechanisms (Auth0 / Okta), and integration workflows
• Prioritize API features, enhancements, and technical debt based on member impact, business value, and engineering capacity
• Manage the full lifecycle of API products including development, testing, documentation, versioning, deprecation, and migration planning — with zero implied continuations; every phase requires a new decision
• Ensure all APIs expose provenance and explanation metadata so agent reasoning is always surfaceable to the member
• Serve as the product owner for the API contracts governing YPO’s AI agents (Peer Discovery, Event Discovery) built on OpenAI + custom RAG and Google Gemini
• Define and enforce the safety contract: agents consume only approved APIs, never raw member data; every agent integration must include a kill-switch-capable API boundary
• Lead discovery sessions with data science, engineering, and product stakeholders to map agentic data flows, identify contract risks, and propose governed API-based solutions
• Establish feedback loop mechanisms in API design so agent hallucination rates, task success rates, and cost-per-outcome metrics are observable and attributable to specific API behaviors
• Act as the primary product-facing technical liaison for internal engineering consumers of the Members, Chapters, and Agentic APIs
• Ensure clear developer documentation, sample queries, sandbox environments, and troubleshooting guides exist for every API in the portfolio
• Support technical onboarding of new product teams and integration partners by ensuring APIs are self-service, well-documented, and stable
• Collaborate with IT and Engineering to resolve integration issues and continuously optimize API usability and adoption
• Work closely with Engineering leads to ensure technical feasibility, scalability, performance, and security of all API products
• Partner with Data Architecture to ensure APIs maintain stable meaning over evolving backend schemas — frontend experience must be decoupled from vendor-specific fields
• Partner with IT and Security to ensure APIs enforce role-based access, chapter-scoped boundaries, and member consent policy (Auth0 / Okta, OneTrust, GDPR, CCPA)
• Collaborate with Product teams to articulate API capabilities, value propositions, and integration narratives for member-facing features
• Coordinate with Engineering and Data to provide technical product insights that support pre- and post-launch discussions across the organization
• Establish and maintain API governance standards including versioning, documentation guidelines, lifecycle management, deprecation policy, and design best practices
• Evaluate and integrate third-party technologies and APIs that enhance YPO’s member ecosystem (e.g., Elasticsearch, Search Orchestration Service, Kafka / AWS EventBridge integrations)
• Work with Engineering to ensure reliable API deployment pipelines, observability via Datadog, alerting, and uptime performance standards
• Drive continuous improvement to API usability, developer experience, performance, and reliability — with a hard standard: issues must never surface only via member complaints

Requirements:

• 5–8+ years of experience as a Technical Product Manager or similar role, with at least 3 years specifically managing API products or technical platforms
• Strong understanding of RESTful and GraphQL API design, data modeling, authentication/authorization frameworks (OAuth 2.0, Auth0, Okta), and integration patterns
• Demonstrated experience translating complex integration requirements into clear product requirements, user stories, and API specifications
• Hands-on experience working with engineering teams to enable API adoption, build integrations, or manage developer experience programs
• Experience with cloud platforms (primarily AWS and/or Azure) and modern DevOps and CI/CD practices
• Familiarity with API gateway and management tooling (e.g., AWS API Gateway, Kong)
• Strong technical acumen, analytical mindset, and ability to understand system architectures, data flows, and graph-based data models
• Experience working within privacy and consent frameworks (GDPR, CCPA) as a product constraint, not an afterthought
• Excellent communication skills — able to interface effectively with engineering, data, IT, and executive stakeholders
• Prior experience building or managing agentic AI product ecosystems, LLM API contracts, or RAG-based product integrations
• Experience with API governance for member-facing or consumer identity platforms where consent and data control are first-class product concerns
• Background in membership organizations, associations, community platforms, or B2C products serving high-trust user relationships
• Prior work with iPaaS solutions such as MuleSoft, Zapier, or Workato for third-party integration orchestration
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures (Kafka, AWS EventBridge / Kinesis) as they relate to API product design
• Experience working with Elasticsearch or Search Orchestration Services to design search-adjacent API products
• Understanding of data observability tooling (e.g., Datadog) applied to API performance monitoring
• Prior experience working with third-party vendors or implementation partners in developing client solutions