Platform Product Lead

Job Description

Platform Product Lead

📍 Location: Sunderland (Hybrid)
🕒 Contract: Permanent

We’re looking for an experienced and strategic Platform Product Lead to shape and scale the core platforms that power tombola’s products.

Our platform teams are the foundation of the player experience — enabling security, reliability, and scalability across everything we build. From player accounts and authentication to game integration and design systems, these platforms are what make innovation possible at speed and scale.

In this role, you’ll lead and develop a team of Product Managers, setting the vision, direction, and roadmap for multiple platform domains. You’ll ensure our internal platforms are treated as products in their own right — with clear value propositions, measurable outcomes, and defined internal customers.

It’s a role for a hands-on product leader who can balance long-term strategy with real-world delivery, combining technical understanding with strong people leadership and commercial awareness.

What you’ll be doing

• Define and lead the vision, strategy, and roadmap for platform domains such as Player Account Management, Auth/Session, CMS & Design System, Game Integration, and Core Platform.
• Manage and develop a team of Product Managers, providing coaching, mentoring, and direction.
• Champion the platform product mindset — ensuring internal platforms deliver measurable value, scalability, and efficiency for customer-facing squads.
• Partner closely with engineering, architecture, and product peers to deliver secure, reusable, and high-performance platform capabilities.
• Balance short-term operational priorities (e.g. compliance, stability) with long-term platform investment and innovation.
• Engage with internal customers across squads, compliance, design, and marketing to understand needs and translate them into actionable requirements.
• Define and track success metrics including adoption, uptime, session stability, and developer efficiency.
• Represent platform strategy at a senior level, advocating for ongoing investment in the foundations that power player-facing growth.
• Foster a collaborative, knowledge-sharing culture across product and engineering teams.

What we’re looking for

• Proven experience as a Product Lead or Senior Product Manager, with responsibility for managing other PMs.
• Strong background in platform or enabling product domains (identity, authentication, CMS, design systems, APIs, integrations).
• Deep understanding of product management best practice — from discovery and roadmap ownership to KPI definition and stakeholder management.
• Ability to articulate the business value of platform work — connecting reliability, speed, and scalability to player experience and commercial outcomes.
• Strong collaboration skills, particularly with engineering and architecture teams.
• Excellent communicator and influencer — able to bridge technical detail and strategic vision.
• Experience mentoring and developing Product Managers to achieve their potential.
• Background in high-scale consumer digital products (e.g. gaming, gambling, fintech, or e-commerce).
• Experience with identity, security, or data-driven platforms is a plus.

Why tombola?

At tombola, we design and build all our own games and technology in-house — giving us complete control over quality, innovation, and player experience.

As Platform Product Lead, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the systems and structures that power one of the UK’s most loved gaming brands, enabling faster delivery, greater resilience, and a world-class player experience.