Job Summary:
AppFolio is a technology leader in the real estate industry, building an AI-Native Performance Platform. The Staff Product Manager will lead teams in managing data pipelines and infrastructure, ensuring high-quality data access to power various products and enhance overall performance.
Responsibilities:
โข 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.
โข Enable Intelligent Systems: Power capabilities across Realm-X, Flows, Performers, and Performance Insights by ensuring unified, high-quality, and real-time data access.
โข Empower Builders: Partner with internal development teams to deliver self-service data tooling, documentation, and APIs that reduce cognitive load and accelerate innovation.
โข Drive Data Quality and Governance: Establish consistent standards for lineage, observability, and accuracy to ensure confidence in every decision powered by AppFolio product data.
โข Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work closely with Engineering, Data Science, Security, and Product leaders to align priorities and deliver platform capabilities that scale.
โข 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.
Qualifications:
Required:
โข You've shipped platform products that other developers depend on
โข You understand the difference between building features for end-users and building capabilities that enable other builders
โข You know platform adoption is earned, not mandated
โข You think in systems and second-order effects
โข When someone proposes a change, you immediately map dependencies, blast radius, and migration paths
โข You see how solving one problem might create three others - and you design to prevent that
โข Engineers forget you're a PM
โข You can read schema definitions, debug API responses, write SQL queries, and understand why eventual consistency matters
โข You don't need to write production code, but you need to understand the technical constraints engineers work within
โข You balance urgency with pragmatism
โข You know when to ship the 80% solution that unblocks teams today versus when to hold out for the right architecture
โข You use 'strangler fig' patterns instead of big rewrites
โข You make data-driven tradeoffs
โข 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
โข You communicate technical complexity to non-technical stakeholders
โข You translate latency budgets into business impact, schema versioning into customer value, and observability gaps into risk decisions executives can make
Preferred:
โข You've built data platforms, developer tools, or infrastructure products that serve internal teams
โข You've worked in modern data stacks (Kafka, Flink, dbt, Trino, GraphQL, data mesh architectures)
โข You have experience designing APIs, data contracts, or schema management systems
โข You've overseen implementing governance at scale without creating bureaucracy
โข You've managed platform migrations while keeping production systems running
โข You have a background in data engineering, distributed systems, or software development
Company:
AppFolio is a cloud business management solutions provider for the real estate industry. Founded in 2006, the company is headquartered in Goleta, USA, with a team of 1001-5000 employees. The company is currently Late Stage.