Principal Product Manager, Certificate Authority

Cloudflare•Austin, TX

About The Position

Cloudflare is building a public, redundant, transparent certificate authority intended to provide another trusted source of automated certificates and strengthen the resilience of the encrypted web. The product will be ACME-first and automation-first, while supporting both emerging technologies such as post-quantum certificates and Merkle Tree Certificates and the classic WebPKI customers rely on today. The Principal Product Manager will define the strategy, roadmap, customer experience, and commercial model for Cloudflare’s Certificate Authority business. This is an early-stage, zero-to-one role requiring close collaboration across product, engineering, security, compliance, legal, operations, sales, marketing, and the WebPKI ecosystem. The successful candidate will help turn a major technical initiative into a product customers trust and adopt, balancing high-consequence infrastructure requirements, customer needs, ecosystem trust, compliance scrutiny, and commercial adoption.

Requirements

10 or more years of product management experience building technical products for developers, security or infrastructure teams, enterprises, or cloud platforms.
Experience with security, identity, infrastructure, or developer-platform products where correctness, reliability, compliance, and trust are core 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.
Business judgment and experience defining product strategy, pricing and packaging, customer segmentation, and go-to-market plans for technical B2B products.
Ability to operate amid 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 when working on high-consequence products where certificate mis-issuance, mis-revocation, or unavailability can become a public ecosystem event.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience in 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, especially involving ACME, SDKs, CLI workflows, Kubernetes, service mesh, mTLS, or infrastructure-as-code integrations.
Experience launching new businesses or zero-to-one products inside a larger platform company.
Familiarity with certificate automation challenges caused 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, including publicly trusted certificates, lifecycle automation, ACME issuance, renewal workflows, 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 shaping requirements that limit failures, reduce customer blast radius, enable automated recovery, and support rapid certificate replacement.
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.
Work with compliance, legal, security, and operations to align product decisions with CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, WebTrust audits, root store policies, CP/CPS 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 interests in decisions balancing trust, transparency, uptime, security, and commercial adoption.
Coordinate with 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 Customer Zero by using the CA internally at Cloudflare scale and incorporating that experience into 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
Eligibility to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan