Principal Product Manager, Front End Platform

Location

New York, NY
Job Description

CondéNast’s audience platform is the front end that powers every digital experience across Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, BonAppétit, VanityFair, Wired and the rest of the portfolio. That means page performance, content rendering, ad delivery, SEO, design system components, accessibility and everything else that determines how millions of readers actually experience our brands on our owned properties and beyond. Wherever our content shows up (on‑site, in apps, through syndication, on social, in search) the audience platform is the foundation. Advertisers depend on it. Brand teams build on it. It needs to be fast, beautiful and reliable.
We’re looking for a Principal Product Manager to own the strategy for this platform. Your job is to make sure our front end enables best‑in‑class experiences for every brand and every piece of content, wherever it reaches an audience. You should deeply understand what makes a great consumer experience and what makes a great platform for the teams building those experiences. That tension is core to the role and you should be energized by it.
We want someone who already works this way and can bring that mindset to how we evolve the audience platform, especially regarding AI. Think of AI as something that changes how platform teams build, ship and maintain software rather than a bolt‑on feature.
Responsibilities

Understand the customer. You have two: Readers who experience our brands through the audience platform and the internal teams who build on it. Spend real time understanding both. Know what good looks like for a consumer content experience across every surface (our own sites, apps, feeds, anywhere our content lives). Know what ad products need from the front end to perform.
Partner deeply with engineering and design. Sit with them as a peer. Understand front end architecture well enough to have real conversations about trade‑offs. Write clear specs while staying loose enough to iterate together. Have a point of view on what great looks like and set targets that push toward the 95th percentile. Track metrics obsessively but also bring editorial instinct to judge quality.
Measure what matters. Define clear metrics for platform health: performance, quality, adoption, developer experience, consumer outcomes, ad delivery. Build dashboards and rituals that keep the team honest. Know the difference between a vanity metric and a useful one.
Get comfortable in the mess. Platform work at a multi‑brand company is inherently messy with competing priorities, legacy systems and ambiguity about who owns what. Hold complexity without being paralyzed. Prioritize AI investment alongside everything else on the roadmap.
Think with AI, not just about it. Use AI in daily work. Consider meaningful use cases such as component generation, documentation, QA, design‑to‑code pipelines, smarter defaults for brand teams. Prioritize AI capabilities that reduce toil.
Stay curious. Front end landscape moves fast. Stay close to emerging tooling, frameworks and AI‑powered development. Bring perspective on what’s worth adopting versus noise. Read broadly and form your own opinions.
Qualifications

10+ years in product management with meaningful time on platform or infrastructure products. Multi‑brand or multi‑product experience is a strong plus.
Real understanding of front end technology: rendering, performance optimization, SEO, component architecture and design systems. Can read a PR and follow a technical discussion.
Consumer product instincts from products where the end user is a real person reading or watching or browsing. Understand engagement, retention and content experience quality.
Familiarity with digital advertising: how ad products intersect with front end performance and UX. Know why page speed and layout stability matter to revenue.
Comfort with ambiguity and experience aligning across multiple teams with competing needs in large organizations.
Strong communication skills: write well, present well, explain platform strategy to editors and engineers alike. Experience across web and mobile (iOS/Android). Good with data and analytics tooling. Define metrics and actually track them.
Desired but not required: Experience at a media or publishing company. Hands‑on experience with design systems (Storybook, Figma component libraries, design tokens). Regular use of AI tools in product work. Shaped product strategy around AI capabilities with real examples.
Compensation

Expected base salary range: $185,000 – $215,000. Salary offers are based on a wide range of factors, including but not limited to relevant skills, training, experience, and education.
EEO Statement

CondéNast is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, familial status and other legally protected characteristics.

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