Senior Product Manager - Ads Platform & Core Capabilities

Team: Product – Nykaa Ads & Monetisation

Reports to: Director, Ads

Company Overview

Nykaa is India's leading beauty and lifestyle destination, operating on an omnichannel model with a strong online presence and an expanding network of retail stores. We offer a comprehensive selection of beauty, skincare, hair care, wellness, and fashion products, catering to millions of customers across the country. Nykaa is committed to providing a curated, personalized, and seamless shopping experience through cutting-edge technology and data-driven insights.

Role Overview

As a Senior Product Manager – Ads Platform & Core Capabilities at Nykaa, you will build the foundational infrastructure that powers Nykaa's ads ecosystem. While our SPM leads the business charter, you will go deep on the platform layer — owning the core ad-serving pipeline, campaign management capabilities, and measurement framework that make the entire ads business possible. This is a role for someone who is deeply curious about how ads platforms work from the ground up, is comfortable getting into technical depth with engineers, and wants to build scalable systems that enable advertisers to run, measure, and optimise their campaigns on Nykaa.

Key Responsibilities

1. Build Core Ads Platform Capabilities

• Own the product roadmap for core ads infrastructure — ad serving, auction mechanics (CPC/CPM/vCPM), pacing, frequency capping, and budget management.

• Define detailed PRDs and technical specifications for platform features, working hand-in-hand with Engineering and Adtech architects.

• Ensure the ads platform is robust, scalable, and low-latency — capable of supporting high ad request volumes with minimal impact on user experience.

2. Campaign Management & Advertiser Tooling

• Build and improve self-serve and managed campaign creation flows — making it easy for brands and agencies to launch, manage, and optimize campaigns on Nykaa.

• Develop advertiser-facing dashboards and reporting tools that provide clear, actionable visibility into campaign performance.

• Own the ad ops and campaign lifecycle — from trafficking and flight management to delivery pacing and campaign teardown.

3. Measurement, Attribution & Reporting

• Build a rigorous, transparent measurement framework — covering impression tracking, click attribution, view-through attribution, and post-purchase ROAS.

• Partner with Data Engineering and Analytics to ensure clean data pipelines that feed accurate, real-time advertiser reporting.

• Identify and reduce attribution blind spots; work with the team to evolve measurement standards as the platform scales.

4. Quality, Trust & Platform Integrity

• Build guardrails to ensure ad quality — brand safety, creative compliance, content policies — so the ad experience is trusted by both users and advertisers.

• Instrument the platform with the right logging and alerting to detect delivery anomalies, underspend, or system degradation early.

What We're Looking For

• At least 4 years of Product Management experience in consumer internet, e-commerce, or ad-tech.

• Strong interest in and working understanding of ads domain fundamentals — auction theory, ad serving, campaign lifecycles, and performance measurement.

• Technical fluency: comfortable working with backend engineers on system design, API contracts, and data pipeline decisions.

• Analytical mindset with hands-on experience defining and tracking ads metrics: impressions, CTR, CVR, fill rate, CPM, and ROAS.

• Detail-oriented executor with excellent documentation skills — able to write tight PRDs and specs that leave no room for ambiguity.

• Academic Background: Bachelor's or Master's degree from a Tier 1 institution, preferably in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.

Good to Have

• Prior exposure to ad servers, SSPs, DSPs, or programmatic advertising pipelines.

• Experience with ad-tech tooling such as Google Ad Manager, Xandr, or similar platforms.

• Familiarity with privacy-safe targeting (contextual, cohort-based) and signal loss in a cookie-less environment.

Why Join Us

Nykaa's Ads business is at an early and exciting stage — there is significant greenfield work to be done in building a world-class retail media platform. As a SPM on the platform team, you'll get to go deep on the foundational building blocks that will power this business for years to come. If you want to understand ads from first principles and ship systems that matter at scale, this is the role for you.