Staff Product Manager, Cloud Networking

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Take charge of the platform strategy for Confluent Cloud Networking across AWS, Azure, and GCP — establishing the guiding vision, long-term roadmap, and prioritization of initiatives that align customer connectivity requirements, cost-effectiveness, security posture, and engineering efficiency.

• Create frameworks and standards utilized by other PMs, designers, and engineers to assess networking decisions — including criteria for connection model selection, cost attribution models, security control frameworks, and readiness standards for launches.

• Collaborate with engineering leadership to influence architectural decisions — balancing trade-offs between user experience, cost, and operational complexity.

• Broaden the scope and generate options — identify related areas the team should explore (such as network observability, cost transparency tools, and next-gen isolation models) and construct the business case for these initiatives.

• Cultivate the product team — mentor Senior PMs, provide constructive feedback on product documentation and roadmap strategies, and elevate the team's approach to customer research and decision-making.

• Foster alignment among senior stakeholders across product, engineering, sales, field, legal, and security teams, and present the platform vision to executive leadership to obtain organizational support — develop the business case, clearly communicate trade-offs, and secure commitment for long-term platform initiatives.

• Establish and manage success metrics at the platform level — linking technical milestones to business outcomes such as revenue, retention, attach rates, and infrastructure cost efficiency.

• Engage directly with strategic customers and prospects — confidently represent the product roadmap in technical discussions with enterprise CTOs, architects, and network engineers.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of 8 years of product management experience, including at least 3 years leading a cloud infrastructure, platform, or networking product.

• Proven experience in defining product strategy and roadmap at a platform or portfolio level — beyond mere feature delivery.

• Extensive knowledge of cloud networking concepts: PrivateLink, VNet peering, Transit Gateway, Private Service Connect, DNS, security groups, CIDR/IP management, and their trade-offs across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

• Experience managing products that cater to enterprise clients with intricate compliance, security, and connectivity needs.

• Established ability to collaborate with engineering leadership as a co-decision-maker regarding architectural direction — not merely translating engineering outputs.

• Strong analytical skills: capable of modeling unit economics, creating business cases with cost/risk sensitivity, and assessing platform health through both leading and lagging indicators.

• Adopts AI-native product management practices — employs AI tools as a real thought partner throughout the product lifecycle (research, prioritization, specification writing, analytics), demonstrating sound judgment on when to utilize, override, and validate AI outputs; and applies this mindset to product design by building features and APIs that are composable, observable, and easily consumable by AI agents and automation.

• Experience in developing PMs and enhancing product thinking — through direct mentorship, feedback, or team processes.

🏝️ Benefits

• Offers Equity