Senior Product Manager, Backend Enablement

Company Description

Depop is a peer-to-peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new.
Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it.
Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company. For more information, visit www.depop.com
We aim to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users.
We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.
AI Disclosure: We use AI tools (Google Gemini) to help our team source and review applications for roles with a high volume of applications. These tools assist our recruiters in identifying great talent but do not replace human decision-making. At Depop, every hiring decision is made by a human.
If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to [email protected].

Role

Backend Enablement is the connective tissue between Depop’s internal engineering teams and the capabilities they need to build great things fast. It owns our API platform, making sure our APIs aren’t just functional, but genuinely good to build on. This is an internally focused space: rather than shipping customer-facing features, it ships the infrastructure and decisions that let dozens of other teams ship theirs.

The Senior Product Manager will be focused on developer experience for our internal engineers, identifying gaps in our services before they become blockers, and building a roadmap flexible enough to support features and experiments other teams haven’t even scoped yet. If you are someone who is curious about how backend systems are built and scaled, comfortable with ambiguity and a confident voice in technical discussions, then this is the role for you.

Responsibilities:

• Own the product strategy, vision and roadmap for Depop’s API platform and backend enablement space, and communicate it clearly and consistently across engineering and stakeholder groups.
• Treat our internal engineers as your users: deeply understand their workflows, pain points, priorities and mental models.
• Hold a high bar for technical solution design, making sure our APIs are intuitive, well-documented and performant, while balancing this against pragmatic delivery timelines.
• Identify gaps in our current services and capabilities before they become blockers, partnering closely with engineering, platform and product teams to understand what they’re trying to build next.
• Think several steps ahead, designing extensible solutions rather than one-off fixes and making deliberate trade-offs between short-term unblocks and long-term platform health.
• Work with engineering leads to sequence work and define success metrics such as adoption, latency, error rates and developer satisfaction.
• Communicate trade-offs and articulate the value of technical initiatives in a user-centric way to stakeholders who may not be technical.
• Shape technical solutions with engineers, without dictating implementation details unless they are material to the developer experience.

Key stakeholders

• Engineering leads and internal engineering teams
• Platform
• Product teams across Depop
• Non-technical stakeholders affected by platform decisions

Requirements

• Experience as a Technical Product Manager, ideally in an API or DB focused environment.
• Hands-on experience with APIs, including REST, versioning and auth patterns.
• Experience setting product strategy and vision with an engineering team, and communicating it clearly and consistently across engineering and stakeholder groups.
• A track record of building trusted relationships with engineering leaders and stakeholders, and using that influence to align priorities across teams you don’t directly manage.
• Experience defining performance and scalability based metrics.
• Able to communicate technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, reframing complexity so it is easy to understand.
• Able to articulate the value of technical initiatives in a user-centric way.
• Familiar with the challenges of building tooling and services for internal customers.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience as a backend engineer, or a Computer Science background.
• Familiarity with queuing technologies.
• Experience with microservice architecture.

Additional Information:

Health + Mental Wellbeing

• PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa
• Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space
• Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support
• Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting

Work/Life Balance

• 25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
• Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering
• Fully paid 4-week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love
• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office-Based, and Remote options *role-dependent
• All offices are dog-friendly

Family Life

• For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees
• For non-birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees
• IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave

Learn + Grow

• Twice-yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews
• Learning budget
• Upskilling our employees with company-wide training workshops, materials and resources

Your Future

• Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)
• Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva

Depop Extras

• In-office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery
• Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!

Additional Information

Health + Mental Wellbeing

• PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa
• Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space
• Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support
• Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting

Work/Life Balance:

• 25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
• Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering
• Fully paid 4-week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid-working model with Flex, Office-Based, and Remote options *role-dependent
• All offices are dog-friendly
  

Family Life:

• For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees
• For non-birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full-time regular employees 
• IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave

Learn + Grow:

• Twice-yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews
• Learning budget
• Upskilling our employees with company-wide training workshops, materials and resources

Your Future:

• Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary)
• Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva

Depop Extras:

• In-office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery.
• Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!