Lead Product Manager, Platform

Job Description

Lead Product Manager, Platform

Location: Remote

About Panorama

Panorama Education is a technology company building the leading platform for student insight and action in K-12. We help modern school systems understand what students need and take effective action. By bringing together academics, attendance, behavior, and engagement data with AI, we give educators the full picture of every student and the intelligence to decide what to do next. As a mission-driven company supporting 15 million students in 2,000 districts nationwide, the work we do has a direct line to student outcomes every day. Join us and help shape what education looks like for the next generation.

About the Role

The Lead Product Manager for Platform will define and drive the strategic direction of the foundational capabilities that power Panorama's products. This role is responsible for setting a long-term platform vision, not just managing a roadmap, and for influencing how the entire engineering organization builds, scales, and delivers on that foundation.

Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you will serve as the senior platform voice across product, engineering, SRE, data, and security. This is a standalone product role embedded within an engineering organization — your immediate team will not include other product managers, though you will have access to strong product partners elsewhere in the organization. The right person will be energized by the autonomy this brings while knowing collaborative support is available across the broader team. You'll own the platform strategy end-to-end, setting direction, aligning stakeholders, and ensuring platform investments compound over time into a durable competitive advantage. Security, compliance, and developer experience are central threads in this work, but the defining challenge is building a platform that lets Panorama move fast at scale without accumulating debt that slows it down.

You'll lead through influence across the organization, partnering with Staff engineers, product leaders, and leaders across the company to shape decisions that touch every team building on Panorama's platform.

Responsibilities

Platform Vision and Strategy

Own the long-term vision and roadmap for Panorama's platform capabilities, including shared services, foundational infrastructure, developer tooling, and operational standards. Drive alignment across engineering and product leadership on platform priorities, sequencing, and investment levels. Translate business strategy into platform architecture decisions that hold up over years, not quarters.

Organizational Enablement

Serve as the connective tissue between platform and product teams, ensuring shared infrastructure accelerates rather than constrains. Define how platform capabilities are built, documented, and adopted across the organization. Establish the standards and patterns that other teams build on, raising the bar for quality, consistency, and velocity across the board.

Senior Cross-Functional Leadership

Lead platform strategy discussions with engineering leadership, SRE, data, security, and legal. Drive alignment on complex, multi-team initiatives where priorities and tradeoffs cut across organizational boundaries. Represent the platform perspective in executive conversations and company-level planning.

Operational Excellence at Scale

Own the definition of what "platform health" means at Panorama and drive the initiatives that get us there, covering performance, resiliency, cost efficiency, and operational maturity. Balance near-term delivery with the longer-term investments that prevent compounding technical risk. Own the framework for triaging reactive and unplanned work — ensuring the team can respond to operational demands without losing sight of strategic priorities.

Scope Governance and Roadmap Discipline

Define what "done" looks like for platform initiatives and hold that line with rigor. Manage competing pressures between engineer-identified improvements, business-driven priorities, and reactive demands. Keep projects from expanding indefinitely by establishing clear completion criteria and making tradeoffs explicit. Build shared discipline around scope so the team moves with focus rather than accumulating open-ended work.

Security, Trust, and Governance

Partner with security and legal leadership to shape how platform capabilities support Panorama's security, privacy, and compliance obligations at a strategic level. Ensure risk reduction is embedded in platform thinking from the start, not bolted on at the end.

Executive and Stakeholder Communication

Own how platform strategy is communicated to senior leadership and the broader organization. Provide clear, compelling narratives about platform investment, progress, and tradeoffs that connect technical decisions to business outcomes.

Requirements

Requirements

Our Ideal Candidate Has:

• 8+ years of product management experience, with significant depth in platform, infrastructure, or developer experience in a technology-driven organization. Previous experience as a software engineer is strongly preferred.
• Technical Credibility: Ability to engage as a peer with Staff engineers on architectural tradeoffs, infrastructure decisions, and long-term system design. Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure on AWS, including services such as EKS, RDS, S3 and IAM is strongly preferred. Familiarity with Terraform for infrastructure-as-code and Kubernetes for container orchestration is a significant plus.
• Proven success driving alignment across engineering, security, and operations at a senior level, influencing direction without formal authority and building shared ownership of platform outcomes.
• Exceptional Communication Skills: Ability to translate complex platform strategy into clear narratives for senior leadership, connecting technical investment to business impact and company priorities. Equally strong in the reverse direction, able to take engineer-identified pain points, technical instincts, and system health signals and translate them into resourced, prioritized business cases.
• Scope and Delivery Discipline: Demonstrated ability to define project completion criteria, resist scope creep in technically-driven environments, and close work decisively. Experience managing backlogs where engineers are enthusiastic contributors to scope, and knowing how to channel that energy without letting it run indefinitely.
• Experience leading product work that intersects with security and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, GDPR, and FERPA, with a strong command of data protection and privacy best practices.
• Developer Experience Focus: A track record of improving developer productivity through investments in CI/CD pipelines, internal tooling, self-service infrastructure, and deployment reliability. Able to measure and articulate the business value of developer experience improvements in terms of shipping velocity, incident reduction, and engineer retention.
• Strong Analytical Skills: Ability to synthesize data, system health signals, and business context into platform priorities that reflect both near-term needs and long-term direction. Experience with monitoring and observability at scale is a plus.
• Collaborative Leadership: Proven ability to lead through influence at the senior level, building alignment and shared success across technical and business organizations.
• Educational Background: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field is a plus, though equivalent practical experience in platform or infrastructure product management is equally valued.

Benefits

Why Panorama?

Panorama Education is committed to building a diverse and inclusive company. We serve students, educators, and families from tremendously diverse backgrounds and identities across the country, and we believe diverse teams drive stronger outcomes. As such, we are an Equal Opportunity Employer.

What We Offer

The “Base Salary” range represents the low and high end of the anticipated salary range for this position across all US locations. Determining this anticipated Base Salary range involves considering many factors in making compensation decisions, including but not limited to: unique skill sets, experience, training, performance, licensure and certifications, and other business and organizational needs. Additionally, our anticipated Base Salary determination is just one component of Panorama’s competitive total rewards strategy, including annual bonus or commission awards, equity awards, and other region-specific health and welfare benefits.

Salary Range $ 176,065.00 - $258,919.00

• Competitive salary and benefits (including equity, health, dental & vision, retirement contribution, parental leave, and mental health & wellness support).
• Remote-first culture: Panoramians can work anywhere in the continental U.S.
• Mission-driven colleagues who care deeply about making education more equitable and sustainable.