Platform Product Manager - Platform Shared Services

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 the shared 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 business↔engineering 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".

Requirements

• 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 against competing engineering demands.
• Technical fluency (real): solid software-engineering fundamentals - enough to engage credibly in architecture discussions, read technical docs, system diagrams and API specs unaided, and reason about trade-offs.
• APIs as products: strong grasp of API design, versioning, documentation and lifecycle management (deprecation, backward compatibility).
• Distributed-systems literacy: working knowledge of backend systems, messaging/event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS) and authentication/authorization protocols (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, JWT).
• Reliability & cloud awareness: SLAs/SLOs, uptime, latency; familiarity with cloud infrastructure (Azure/AWS/GCP).
• Education/background: Bachelor's in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent practical/technical experience - a technical/engineering background is preferred over a pure business/PM background given the hard technical requirements.
• Language: Professional-level English (spoken and written).

Nice to Have

• Demonstrated experience with authentication and/or messaging systems (strongly preferred).
• Familiarity with GDPR / consent and email deliverability at scale.
• Experience with Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes (AKS), and modern CI/CD (GitHub Actions).
• Experience facilitating InnerSource or community-driven contributions to shared services.
• Interest or experience in Spec-Driven Development and AI coding assistants (Cursor, MCP).
• Background in Scientific Publishing.

How We Measure Success in This Role

• Adoption & integration: number of teams/services on the supported IAM and Messaging paths; time-to-first-call for a new integration.
• Reliability: SLAs/SLOs met for the owned services; incident trend.
• Developer experience: internal satisfaction/NPS of consuming teams; support-request trend; quality and currency of contracts and docs.
• Security & compliance: posture against the Technology Framework (OAuth/JWT, GDPR consent); audit-readiness.
• Cost: run cost of the services (incl. email/deliverability spend) under control.

Why This Role Is Exciting

IAM and Messaging are leverage: get them right and every team at Frontiers ships faster and safer. You'll turn "plumbing" into genuine products - with real customers, contracts and adoption - at the exact moment AI is multiplying how much code (and how many integrations) those teams produce. All in service of a mission that matters: making science open for everyone.

Benefits

• We prioritise office presence and emphasise in-person collaboration, but also offer appropriate adjustments where needed, in line with company policy

• Extra wellbeing days on top of your annual leave allowance

• Up to 3 paid volunteering days each year

• 24/7 confidential Employee Assistance Programme (wellbeing, mental health, legal & financial support)

• Learning & development support via the Frontiers Learning Hub

Equal opportunity statement

Frontiers actively embraces diversity and is a safe and welcoming workplace. Recruitment is free from discrimination - including based on race, national or ethnic origin, age, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation. With employees from more than 50 different nations, our diversity creates vibrant teams and constantly challenges us to appreciate multiple perspectives.