Lead Product Manager - Cloud Infrastructure

AvePoint•Chicago, IL

1d•$150,000 - $215,000

About The Position

We are looking for a hands-on cloud infrastructure practitioner who can lead product. You will own the strategy, roadmap, and execution for AvePoint’s IaaS and PaaS data protection portfolio across Azure, AWS, and GCP: compute and virtual machines, managed and self-managed databases, object and file storage, Kubernetes, and infrastructure configuration. This is a highly technical product leadership role connecting cloud architecture, backup and disaster recovery, cyber resilience, and SaaS business outcomes. Cloud Infrastructure is one of AvePoint’s highest-priority investment areas. You will work closely with principal architects and engineers, customers, partners, and field teams to turn real operational challenges into differentiated capabilities and business growth—not simply manage a backlog.

Requirements

Production-cloud experience. 6+ years in B2B technology, cloud infrastructure, enterprise software, or a related technical domain, including substantial, recent hands-on work designing, building, operating, troubleshooting, or architecting production cloud workloads. Relevant backgrounds include cloud/platform engineering, SRE, solutions architecture, technical pre-sales, and cloud consulting. Demos, labs, or oversight alone are not sufficient.
Infrastructure depth. Deep expertise in at least one hyperscaler, with working fluency in transferable concepts across the others: compute, object/block/file storage, managed relational and NoSQL databases, VNet/VPC networking and private endpoints, IAM/RBAC, encryption and key management, and availability zones and regions.
SaaS experience. Understand how a hyperscaler-hosted service operates: control and data planes, multi-tenancy, customer-cloud connectivity, security boundaries, scaling, reliability, observability, and cost-to-serve. Experience must extend beyond simply consuming cloud services.
Infrastructure as code and automation. Working knowledge of tools such as Terraform, Bicep/ARM, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or equivalents, and how production environments are defined, changed, and recovered. Expertise in every listed tool is not expected.
Kubernetes fluency. Understand cluster versus application state, persistent volumes, CSI snapshots, application consistency, and cross-cluster recovery. Working fluency is required; deeper hands-on experience running AKS, EKS, or GKE in production is highly desirable, not mandatory.
Backup and recovery understanding. Strong familiarity with RPO/RTO, point-in-time recovery, native backup mechanisms, retention, snapshots versus independent copies, immutability/WORM, cross-region and cross-account recovery, ransomware resilience, and recovery validation. Backup-industry tenure does not replace cloud depth.
Cloud economics. Understand storage tiering, snapshot retention, API and transaction costs, temporary compute, data retrieval, and cross-region traffic or egress—and how architectural choices affect both customer costs and AvePoint’s product margin.
Demonstrated product judgment. Experience shaping shipped technical products, platforms, or services through customer insight, prioritization, and trade-offs. Product management or product-adjacent experience counts; a formal PM title is not required when technical depth and product judgment are demonstrated.
Technical credibility. Independently reason through system design, question assumptions, and identify architectural risks. Discuss scale, reliability, performance, security, recovery, and cost with principal engineers and architects, and translate that understanding into product decisions.
Leadership and customer communication. Lead without authority, listen deeply, ask technically sharp questions, and communicate clearly with technical and executive audiences. Bring competitive curiosity and use telemetry, support evidence, and business metrics to guide decisions.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Deeper production Kubernetes experience or relevant cloud/Kubernetes certifications.
Experience with MSPs, GSIs, or partners delivering managed cloud infrastructure, backup, or disaster recovery.
Experience with cloud marketplaces, hyperscaler co-sell, or partner-led delivery.

Responsibilities

Lead technical product decisions. Work directly with Architecture and Engineering on cloud APIs, snapshots and incremental change mechanisms, crash versus application consistency, IAM and service identities, private networking, encryption, and customer-managed keys. Review designs for missing requirements, operational risks, and recovery gaps.
Own strategy and workload expansion. Set the roadmap and coverage sequence across Azure, AWS, and GCP. Balance depth versus breadth and define complete protection for each service: backup, restore granularity, regional and account recovery, security, performance, and cost.
Shape the SaaS architecture. Partner on control-plane and data-plane responsibilities, AvePoint-hosted versus customer-hosted components, data movement and storage placement, tiering, deduplication and compression, and the economics of scaling a reliable protection service.
Drive cyber resilience. Define product direction for immutability and WORM, logically isolated copies, ransomware and anomaly detection, recovery validation, and clean or isolated recovery environments. Make provable recoverability part of what the product delivers.
Own competitive direction. Evaluate third-party protection products and hyperscaler-native capabilities. Turn evidence about customer needs, competitive gaps, and native-platform limitations into clear investment and positioning decisions.
Connect discovery to delivery. Work with cloud architects, platform and security teams, partners, MSPs, and internal field teams. Translate the problems behind their requests into requirements, acceptance criteria, and a prioritized backlog informed by telemetry, support data, and technical risk.
Measure technical and business outcomes. Track workload coverage, backup reliability, recovery success and time, storage efficiency, cost per protected TB, adoption, ARR growth, and competitive win/loss outcomes. Use these measures to guide investment and improve customer and product economics.
Lead with technical credibility. Support strategic deals, proofs of concept, and customer architecture discussions. Lead without authority across functions and communicate priorities, risks, and technical and business trade-offs clearly to engineers, executives, customers, and partners.
Bring capabilities to market. Partner with Product Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success on launches, positioning, packaging, pricing guidance, technical enablement, marketplaces, co-sell, and MSP programs. Coordinate adjacent AvePoint product dependencies while retaining a clear infrastructure focus.