Principal Technical Product Manager, Content Platform

Job Description

Arc XP is a cloud-based digital experience platform that helps enterprise companies, retail brands, and media and entertainment organizations create and distribute content, drive digital commerce, and deliver powerful multichannel experiences. A division of The Washington Post, Arc XP has powered the digital transformation of customers across the globe, currently serving more than 1,500 sites in 25 countries that reach more than 1.5 billion unique visitors monthly.

Built 100% on AWS, the Arc platform employs a microservice architecture with a headless, API-first approach to content management. All of our software teams use DevOps to deliver and maintain products. Our processes are lightweight, which allows our teams to innovate quickly to bring new ideas to market. New features and products are deployed to our customer base every day.

We are looking for a Principal Product Manager who can shape the future of how content is created, structured, and delivered in an AI-native world. This role sits at the intersection of headless content management, intelligent automation, and platform strategy. You will own the product vision for our Content Platform, defining how AI capabilities are woven into the content lifecycle—from authoring and enrichment to orchestration and multichannel delivery. You'll work closely with our Content Creation, Cloud Platform, and Developer Experience teams to build the next generation of tools that empower both human creators and AI agents to produce, manipulate, and distribute content at scale.

As a principal-level Product Manager, you'll operate as a fractional PM across several pods in the content platform space simultaneously, threading a coherent product thesis through related missions rather than going deep on any single pod's backlog. You'll set direction across those pods, mentor other product managers, and own the strategic narrative for where the content platform is going—not just the next quarter, but the next several years.

This isn't about bolting AI onto an existing CMS. We're rethinking what a content platform looks like when AI is a first-class participant in the content supply chain, and we need someone who has a clear, opinionated vision for that future.

What Motivates You

• You think in systems and see content platforms as orchestration layers, not just storage and retrieval.

• You get energized by the ambiguity of defining new product categories at the intersection of AI and content.

• You believe in the empowered product team model, where engineering, design, and product work as true partners in discovery and delivery, not a feature factory.

• You're comfortable supporting multiple pods simultaneously as a fractional PM, holding the broader product thesis in your head and pulling threads together across related missions rather than living inside one pod's backlog.

• You're passionate about lean product development—validating assumptions early, learning fast, and shipping incremental value rather than big-bang releases.

• You want to shape how enterprises create and deliver content over the next five years, not just optimize what exists today.

• Comfortable leading through influence across engineering, design, and go-to-market teams.

• You already use AI tools in your daily workflow—for research, writing, analysis, prototyping, or decision-making—and you're excited about pushing those boundaries further because you believe the best way to build AI-powered products is to live the workflow yourself.

How You'll Support the Mission

• Define the long-term vision and product strategy for Arc's Content Platform, establishing how AI transforms content creation, management, orchestration, and delivery.

• Lead the evolution of AI-native content capabilities by identifying opportunities to embed intelligent automation throughout the content lifecycle while balancing customer needs with long-term platform strategy.

• Drive the evolution of Arc's content architecture, APIs, and platform capabilities to support both human creators and AI-powered systems.

• Build and maintain a strategic product roadmap that sequences foundational platform investments, AI capabilities, and developer experience improvements to maximize customer value.

• Partner with engineering, design, and customer-facing teams to define requirements, evaluate technical approaches, prioritize investments, and deliver platform capabilities through iterative product development.

• Align product direction across multiple Content Platform, Cloud Infrastructure, and Developer Experience pods, ensuring initiatives reinforce a unified product vision and measurable customer outcomes.

• Champion AI-first ways of working by applying AI tools throughout product discovery, planning, research, analysis, and prototyping while helping establish best practices across the product organization.

• Represent Arc XP with customers, industry partners, and standards organizations to influence emerging content platform and AI standards while translating industry direction into product strategy.

• Build strong feedback loops with customers, developers, internal stakeholders, and go-to-market teams to continuously refine platform direction and strengthen customer outcomes.

• Define success metrics, monitor platform performance, identify strategic risks, and communicate product progress and investment priorities to executive leadership.

The Skills and Experience You Bring

• 10+ years in product management, with at least 5 years working on content platforms, headless CMS, or digital experience platforms.

• Demonstrated experience defining and shipping AI-powered product capabilities (not just integrating third-party APIs, but thinking through how AI changes workflows, data models, and user expectations).

• Deep familiarity with headless/decoupled content architectures, content modeling, and API-first platform design.

• Experience setting product strategy at the principal or staff level, including mentoring other PMs and shaping how the broader product organization operates.

• Experience operating within an empowered product team model, partnering closely with engineering and design through continuous discovery and iterative delivery.

• Daily, hands-on use of AI-powered tools (LLMs, coding assistants, research agents, etc.) to materially accelerate your own product work—PRDs, research synthesis, competitive analysis, data exploration, and rapid prototyping. You should be able to point to specific workflows you've reinvented around AI, not just tools you've tried.

Preferred

• BA/BS or equivalent practical experience. Advanced degree welcome but not required.

• Strong understanding of modern content management paradigms: structured content, headless delivery, COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere), content-as-a-service.

• Working knowledge of AI/ML concepts as they apply to content—including generation, classification, enrichment, summarization, and agentic workflows.

• Comfort operating in an AI-first team culture where AI tools are expected to be part of how you think, write, analyze, and ship—not a novelty, but a core part of the workday.

• Proven ability to translate a forward-looking technical vision into a concrete, prioritized roadmap.

• Track record of operating as a fractional PM across multiple empowered pods at once, framing each pod's work as a sequence of small, hypothesis-driven bets that compound into a larger thesis—not as long, fixed-scope programs with distant delivery dates.

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and to articulate a compelling product narrative.

• Grounded in lean product development principles: hypothesis-driven development, rapid experimentation, validated learning, and outcome-over-output thinking.

• Experience with news, media, or publishing platforms (understanding editorial workflows, content velocity, and audience-facing delivery).

• Experience with Platform as a Service (PaaS) product development empowering developers to build on top of your platform.

• Familiarity with LLM orchestration frameworks, AI agent architectures, or content-aware AI pipelines.

• A portfolio or examples of how you've used AI to meaningfully accelerate your own product management work (we'll ask about this in interviews).

• Experience leading B2B and B2B2C platform products.

• Background in cloud-native, serverless, or microservice architectures on AWS.

• Experience representing a company in industry standards bodies or working groups (e.g., IAB Tech Lab, W3C), particularly around content monetization, syndication, or AI/agent access standards.

• Experience shipping subscription or paywall products — pricing, metering, entitlements, or churn/retention work for digital content platforms.

• Background in advertising technology (programmatic, header bidding, ad ops, or ad-serving integrations) and how platform architecture exposes inventory and signal to drive revenue.

Compensation and Benefits

Wherever you are in your life or career, The Washington Post offers comprehensive and inclusive benefits for every step of your journey:

• Competitive medical, dental and vision coverage

• Company-paid pension and 401(k) match

• Three weeks of vacation and up to three weeks of paid sick leave

• Nine paid holidays and two personal days

• 20 weeks paid parental leave for any new parent

• Robust mental health resources

• Backup care and caregiver concierge services

• Gender affirming services

• Pet insurance

• Free Post digital subscription

• Leadership and career development program

Benefits may vary based on the job, full-time or part-time schedule, location, and collectively bargained status

The salary range for this position is:

The actual salary within this range will depend on individual skills, experience, and qualifications as they relate to specific job requirements. This position may be eligible for a bonus or incentive program, and a member of the Talent Acquisition team will discuss bonus payment terms and conditions during the interview process.

The Post strives to provide its readers with high-quality, trustworthy news and information while constantly innovating. That mission is best served by a diverse, multi-generational workforce with varied life experiences and perspectives. All cultures and backgrounds are welcomed.