Technical Product Manager - Platform Team
Location: Bengaluru | Team: Platform Engineering | Experience: 4-6 years
About Pratilipi
Pratilipi is India's largest storytelling platform, serving millions of readers and writers across 12+ languages through products spanning literature, comics, and audio.
About the Team
Platform is the technical gatekeeper for everything Pratilipi builds. Behind every product we ship sits a Platform team - the engineering backbone that powers shared infrastructure, common capabilities, internal tooling, the foundational technologies and developer productivity across all our business units.
About the Role
We are hiring a Technical Product Manager for the Platform team. The role has direct visibility into leadership across engineering and product, a clearly scoped mandate with defined success measures, and a rare shot at shaping how a platform organization transitions from operational gatekeeper to innovation engine.
Your job is to be the translation layer between the business and the platform. As business priorities shift - a vertical scaling faster than expected, another changing trajectory - you ensure platform investments shift with them, proactively rather than reactively. You will work alongside an engineering leadership team who own technical execution; you bring business context, prioritization rigor, and cross-functional alignment.
What You Will Own
Business → Platform translation - Continuously track how business and product priorities are evolving across different business units, and translate them into a platform priority map. Establishing regular connects with product and business leads to gather their future roadmap, so the platform anticipates and plans for their needs instead of catching up to them.
Prioritization and focus - The platform serves every team in the company, and every team has legitimate asks. Build and run an objective prioritization framework - strategic impact, business leverage, engineering effort, opportunity cost - so the team spends its constrained bandwidth on the highest-leverage work and reactive interruptions trend toward zero.
Cost optimization - Infrastructure cost decisions today are largely engineering-driven. You will add the business and product lens: mapping platform spend against business value delivered, identifying high-cost/low-value capabilities, and ensuring every major platform investment carries a documented business rationale alongside the engineering one.
Future capability planning - Identify the shared foundational capabilities - AI infrastructure being a live example - that multiple teams will need, so they get built once for the organization instead of independently and inconsistently by each team. Maintain a 12-18 month capability horizon and drive adoption of what gets built.
What Success Looks Like
Within your first year:
- Platform priorities visibly re-align when business context shifts, without escalation;
- Reactive/ad-hoc work drops to a small fraction of team capacity;
- Major investments carry documented business-value rationale; and
- At least one shared capability you championed is adopted across multiple business units.
- Engineering leaders spend less time on prioritization trade-offs and more time on execution.
What We Are Looking For
- 4-6 years of product management experience, with meaningful time spent close to engineering - developer-facing products, infrastructure, internal platforms, or SaaS/API products.
- Strong technical fluency: you can read an architecture discussion, understand cost and scalability trade-offs, and hold your own in reviews - without needing to be the one writing code.
- Demonstrated prioritization judgment in a high-ambiguity, resource-constrained environment. You know how to say no with a framework, not a feeling.
- Ability to understand business strategy, product direction, and technology constraints into a coherent, defensible roadmap narrative.
- Strong written communication - much of this role's leverage comes from documents: priority maps, investment rationales, capability horizons.
- Comfort operating as a partner to engineering leadership rather than the sole decision-maker. Platform prioritization here is a shared responsibility, weighted toward engineering while the team's foundational backlog is being worked down.
- An engineer shifted to Product for the love of Business would be a plus.
What This Role Is Not
- Not a user-facing feature PM role - feature and experimentation decisions stay with product/business unit teams.
- Not a process-building role. We deliberately chose this experience band because we want sharp judgment applied to specific coordination and prioritization problems, not new layers of framework and ceremony.
- Not a solo flyer. Engineering leadership drives technical execution and engineering excellence; you drive business context, prioritization, and alignment. The strength of this role is the Partnership.