Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform

DigitalOcean•Seattle, WA

13h•Hybrid

About The Position

DigitalOcean is seeking a Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform who is passionate about running managed compute services at scale, specifically App Platform, Serverless Functions, and Container Registry. This role involves owning the product strategy and roadmap for these services, focusing on both the developer-facing product and the underlying platform economics. The ideal candidate will be adept at discussing customer workflows and capacity/margin, trusted by engineering on architectural trade-offs, and instrumental in building out the compute platform PM group in India. This is a hybrid role.

Requirements

8+ years of product management experience, with a proven track record defining and launching managed cloud compute, PaaS, serverless, or container products, ideally with ownership of both customer experience and unit economics.
Strong working knowledge of PaaS, serverless, and container registry models, including buildpack-based deploys, function runtimes and triggers, concurrency and cold start tradeoffs, and OCI image build, storage, and distribution.
Solid understanding of the cloud compute landscape, including CPU architectures (Intel, AMD, ARM) and their price/performance characteristics, virtualization and microVMs, container runtimes and isolation, and their impact on density, latency, and cost.
Cost and capacity acumen, including understanding of compute, memory, storage, and network cost drivers, ability to build a cost-to-serve model for a multi-tenant service, and experience using this model for pricing and utilization targets.
Strong developer-experience instinct and the ability to specify APIs, CLIs, and console flows that are simple, with a bias toward effective defaults.
Data-driven decision making, with the ability to define key metrics, analyze utilization and margin dashboards alongside product dashboards, and adjust strategy based on data.
Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership skills, with a record of aligning engineering, infrastructure, finance, and GTM stakeholders across different time zones.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on Kubernetes experience (cluster operations, workload scheduling, the operator and Helm ecosystem, or building a platform on top of it).
Prior experience on an IaaS or compute team, such as VM or bare metal product, capacity planning, or fleet efficiency.
Experience shipping on or competing with Heroku, Render, Fly.io, Cloud Run, Lambda, Fargate, ECR/GCR/ACR, or similar.
Familiarity with datacenter fundamentals (rack layouts, power and cooling, network design) at a level sufficient for credible conversations with infrastructure teams.
Prior experience as an early or lead PM for a product area in a new geography.
Familiarity with DigitalOcean's existing product portfolio.

Responsibilities

Own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for App Platform, Serverless Functions, and DOCR, ensuring alignment with DigitalOcean's overall compute platform strategy and translating them into prioritized, well-scoped features.
Own the platform economics of these services, defining how applications, functions, and registry storage map onto Droplets and shared compute, tracking cost to serve per unit of customer workload, and driving improvements in utilization, density, and bin-packing with engineering and finance.
Stay informed about the compute landscape, including processor roadmaps, virtualization technologies, and container runtimes, and translate these trends into platform decisions regarding instance sizing, runtime choices, and price/performance tiers.
Define the end-to-end developer journey for these services, from source code or container image to a deployed, autoscaled, observable application or function, and eliminate integration seams.
Conduct customer discovery with developers, startups, and SMB platform teams, analyze support and community feedback, and translate insights into clear jobs-to-be-done, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
Own packaging and pricing for platform services, including metering compute, egress, build minutes, storage, invocations, and image pulls, ensuring pricing aligns with cost to serve and service integration with other DigitalOcean offerings.
Partner with engineering on architectural trade-offs in the control plane and data plane, covering areas like build pipelines, autoscaling, cold start behavior, registry performance, and multi-region placement.
Drive performance, reliability, and efficiency outcomes by setting clear SLOs and cost targets, and championing necessary improvements.
Monitor the competitive landscape for managed compute and PaaS offerings, identifying opportunities for differentiation.
Lead end-to-end product launches in collaboration with product marketing, documentation, sales, and support teams, and manage post-launch results including adoption, activation, retention, and margin.