Principal Product Manager, Certificate Authority

Cloudflare•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Cloudflare is building a public, redundant, transparent certificate authority to provide another trusted source of automated certificates and strengthen the resilience of the encrypted web. The CA is intended to be ACME-first, automation-first, and transparent by design, while supporting both emerging approaches such as post-quantum certificates and Merkle Tree Certificates and the classic WebPKI customers rely on today. The Principal Product Manager will define the product strategy, roadmap, customer experience, and commercial model for Cloudflare’s Certificate Authority business. This early-stage role will work across product, engineering, security, compliance, legal, operations, sales, marketing, and the WebPKI ecosystem to build customer trust and adoption. The role calls for zero-to-one product building, deep customer discovery, and sound judgment in high-consequence infrastructure, compliance, and ecosystem-trust contexts. The position is available in Austin or London. Compensation may be adjusted based on work location. The role is eligible for Cloudflare’s equity plan. Applicants progressing to the offer stage may be asked to attend an in-person interview at a Cloudflare office or hub. The position may require access to information protected by U.S. export control laws, and an offer may be conditioned on authorization to access controlled technology without export-license sponsorship.

Requirements

10+ years of product management experience building technical products for developers, security teams, infrastructure teams, enterprises, or cloud platforms.
Experience with security, identity, infrastructure, or developer platform products where correctness, reliability, compliance, and trust are core product requirements.
Working knowledge of PKI and certificate lifecycle management, including TLS certificates, X.509, ACME, public and private CAs, revocation, Certificate Transparency, mTLS, HSMs, and enterprise certificate automation.
Experience defining product strategy, pricing and packaging, customer segmentation, and go-to-market plans for technical B2B products.
Ability to work in ambiguity and create structure for a new business, including market definition, customer discovery, roadmap tradeoffs, launch planning, and executive alignment.
Technical fluency with engineering teams and comfort discussing APIs, distributed systems, key management, audit trails, reliability, operational failure modes, and security tradeoffs.
Strong written communication for strategy documents, product requirements, launch narratives, customer-facing messaging, and high-stakes internal decisions.
Sound judgment and discipline in high-consequence work involving potential mis-issued, mis-revoked, or unavailable certificates.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience with certificate authority, PKI, certificate lifecycle management, cloud security, identity, or trust-services products.
Experience with publicly trusted CAs, private PKI, managed certificate services, or platforms such as AWS Certificate Manager, AWS Private CA, Google Trust Services, DigiCert, Sectigo, Let’s Encrypt / ISRG, Entrust, Microsoft PKI, HashiCorp Vault PKI, step-ca, or CFSSL.
Familiarity with CA/Browser Forum requirements, browser root programs, WebTrust for CAs, WebTrust Baseline Requirements, or public CA incident reporting.
Experience building API-first developer products, particularly involving ACME, SDKs, CLI workflows, Kubernetes, service mesh, mTLS, or infrastructure-as-code integrations.
Experience launching new businesses or zero-to-one products within a larger platform company.
Familiarity with certificate automation challenges created by 90-day and shorter certificate lifetimes.
Familiarity with post-quantum cryptography, crypto-agility, Merkle Tree Certificates, or customer migration planning for cryptographic transitions.
Prior participation in WebPKI, IETF, browser trust, transparency, or security standards communities.

Responsibilities

Define product strategy for Cloudflare’s CA business, covering publicly trusted certificates, certificate lifecycle automation, ACME issuance, renewals, revocation, Certificate Transparency, customer controls, developer experience, and platform integrations.
Understand the needs of developers, site owners, platform teams, SaaS providers, enterprise security teams, infrastructure operators, and partners who depend on certificates.
Make resilience a product principle by designing for limited failure impact, automated recovery, and fast certificate replacement during compliance issues, revocation events, or ecosystem incidents.
Drive an ACME-first customer experience that enables users of existing free or automated CAs to adopt Cloudflare with minimal tooling changes.
Partner with engineering on certificate lifecycle systems, automated issuance and renewal, HSM integration, key protection, auditability, reliability, and correctness.
Partner with compliance, legal, security, and operations to align product decisions with CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, WebTrust audits, root store program policies, Certificate Policy and Certification Practice Statement commitments, and public incident response expectations.
Own go-to-market strategy, including packaging, pricing, launch sequencing, competitive positioning, customer segmentation, sales enablement, developer messaging, and adoption metrics.
Represent customer and ecosystem needs in product decisions that balance trust, transparency, uptime, security, and commercial adoption.
Work across Cloudflare product and infrastructure teams, including SSL/TLS, Application Security, Zero Trust, Workers, Registrar, DNS, Load Balancing, SaaS products, and teams that consume or expose certificate services.
Make Cloudflare a customer zero by ensuring internal use of the CA tests the product at Cloudflare scale and informs the roadmap before customers depend on it.

Benefits

Medical/Rx insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
Flexible Spending Accounts
Commuter Spending Accounts
Fertility and family-forming benefits
On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
Global Travel Medical Insurance
Short- and long-term disability insurance
Life and accident insurance
401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
Employee Stock Participation Plan
Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave
Equity plan participation