First American

Principal Product Manager - Golden Path Platform

USA, California, Santa Ana Full time

Who We Are

Join a team that puts its People First! Since 1889, First American (NYSE: FAF) has held an unwavering belief in its people. They are passionate about what they do, and we are equally passionate about fostering an environment where all feel welcome, supported, and empowered to be innovative and reach their full potential. Our inclusive, people-first culture has earned our company numerous accolades, including being named to the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® list for eleven consecutive years. We have also earned awards as a best place to work for women, diversity and LGBTQ+ employees, and have been included on more than 50 regional best places to work lists. First American will always strive to be a great place to work, for all. For more information, please visit www.careers.firstam.com.

What We Do

You'd own the product strategy for Golden Path - First American's internal developer platform. Think of it as the paved road for how engineering teams build, deploy, and operate software across the enterprise. Your customers are engineers. Your roadmap is shaped as much by security, compliance, and infrastructure constraints as it is by feature requests. Your success metric is adoption - are teams choosing to use the platform because it makes their lives easier?

This isn't a feature factory PM role. It's a platform product role where you're balancing the needs of dozens of engineering teams, navigating enterprise architecture and information security requirements, managing cross-org dependencies, and making hard tradeoff calls with limited resources.

*We are open to remote candidates for this role

What You'll Do: 

  • Product strategy and roadmap for the Golden Path platform (Kubernetes-based, multi-cloud, supporting hundreds of microservices across cloud providers). 

  • Prioritization across competing demands - migrations, platform connectivity, multi-cloud buildout, developer experience improvements, and security/compliance requirements. 

  • Stakeholder alignment with VP-level engineering leaders, enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, and program management. 

  • The product narrative - weekly updates, tradeoff communication, escalation management, and decision documentation. 

  • Product Discovery board management - every idea framed as a problem with a customer, impact, and measurable outcome. 

 

What You'll Bring: 

  • Proven platform product leadership. You've owned an internal developer platform, infrastructure product, or developer tools product at scale before - not as a supporting PM, but as the strategic owner. You've driven adoption across skeptical engineering teams, managed platform roadmaps with 20+ consuming teams, and made the hard prioritization calls when everything was on fire. 

  • Deep technical fluency. You're comfortable in architecture discussions around Kubernetes, IAM, CI/CD, cloud networking, database connectivity, and infrastructure-as-code. You've worked closely enough with infrastructure and platform engineers to earn their respect - not by writing code, but by understanding constraints well enough to make decisions they trust. When an architect says, "we can't do that because of IAM boundaries," you know what that means and can propose alternatives. 

  • Executive-level communication and presence. You've been the person in the room with VPs and CTOs representing a platform organization. You know how to frame tradeoffs so leadership can make decisions, how to say no to a priority without creating enemies, and how to own a narrative across multiple stakeholder groups with competing interests. This isn't a skill you're developing - it's one you bring. 

  • A track record of operating in complexity. You've juggled concurrent program migrations, multi-cloud strategies, security/compliance constraints, and cross-org dependencies before. You don't need someone to hand you a prioritized backlog - you build one, defend it, and adjust it when reality shifts. 

 

Nice to Have: 

  • Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, or similar infrastructure tooling. 

  • Direct experience with engineering patterns spanning APIs, cloud networking, data lake architectures, and AI agents and integrations built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP). 

  • Background in financial services, healthcare, or other regulated industries where compliance and cybersecurity are embedded in every product decision. 

  • Experience leading through organizational change - platform consolidation, team restructuring, or post-acquisition integration. 

 

Why this role matters right now: 

Golden Path is the backbone of how First American's engineering teams ship software. We're in the middle of a multi-cloud expansion, and standing up data platform connectivity - all while keeping the lights on for 50+ services in production. The platform is growing faster than our ability to manage it strategically, and we need someone who can own that problem end to end. 

Pay Range: $170,900.00 - $227,900.00 Annually

 

This hiring range is a reasonable estimate of the base pay range for this position at the time of posting. Pay is based on a number of factors which may include job-related knowledge, skills, experience, business requirements and geographic location.

 

** Note that the following statements only apply to candidates who will be working from an unincorporated area within Los Angeles County. **

First American will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws (e.g., the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act).

First American intends to conduct a review of an applicant’s criminal history in connection with a conditional offer. First American reasonably believes that a criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following material job duties for this position potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment: handling of confidential, proprietary or trade secret information belonging to First American or its customers, administrating or facilitating financial transactions, and the ability to meet customer-imposed criminal history requirements.

What We Offer

By choice, we don’t simply accept individuality – we embrace it, we support it, and we thrive on it! Our People First Culture celebrates diversity, equity and inclusion not simply because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it’s the key to our success. We are proud to foster an authentic and inclusive workplace For All. You are free and encouraged to bring your entire, unique self to work. First American is an equal opportunity employer in every sense of the term.

Based on eligibility, First American offers a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401k, PTO/paid sick leave and other great benefits like an employee stock purchase plan.