Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform

DigitalOcean • Seattle, WA

8d • $186,400 - $279,600 • Hybrid

About The Position

DigitalOcean is seeking a Staff Product Manager to own the product strategy and roadmap for App Platform, Serverless Functions, and DigitalOcean Container Registry (DOCR). These managed compute services enable developers to deploy without managing servers, and the role covers both customer-facing experiences and the underlying platform economics, including workload placement, cost to serve, and infrastructure efficiency.

The role reports to the Director of Product and partners closely with the Hyderabad-based Compute Cloud Services engineering team, product peers across Droplet/VPC, Kubernetes, and infrastructure, as well as finance and go-to-market teams. The Product Manager will shape the developer journey from source repository or container image through deployment and operation, guide architecture and pricing decisions, and drive service adoption, reliability, performance, and margin outcomes.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of product management experience.
• Proven record defining and launching managed cloud compute, PaaS, serverless, or container products, ideally owning both customer experience and unit economics.
• Strong working knowledge of PaaS, serverless, and container registry models, including buildpack-based deployment, function runtimes and triggers, concurrency and cold-start tradeoffs, and OCI image building, storage, and distribution.
• Understanding of cloud compute, including Intel, AMD, and ARM CPU architectures and price/performance; virtualization and microVMs; container runtimes and isolation; and effects on density, latency, and cost.
• Cost and capacity acumen, including compute, memory, storage, and network cost drivers; ability to develop a cost-to-serve model for a multi-tenant service and translate it into pricing and utilization targets.
• Strong developer-experience instincts and ability to specify APIs, CLIs, and console flows that are simple, with useful defaults and user-friendly escape hatches.
• Data-driven decision-making skills, including defining metrics, interpreting utilization and margin data alongside product metrics, and changing course based on results.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership, including aligning engineering, infrastructure, finance, and go-to-market stakeholders across time zones.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on Kubernetes experience, such as cluster operations, workload scheduling, the operator and Helm ecosystem, or building a platform on Kubernetes.
• 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 services.
• Familiarity with datacenter fundamentals, including rack layouts, power and cooling, and network design, sufficient to collaborate credibly 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, aligned with DigitalOcean’s compute platform strategy.
• Translate strategy into prioritized, well-scoped features that are simple for customers to use and efficient to operate.
• Own platform economics, including mapping workloads and registry storage to compute, tracking unit cost to serve, and improving utilization, density, and bin-packing with engineering and finance.
• Assess processor roadmaps, virtualization and microVM technologies, container runtimes, and isolation models; translate relevant trends into platform decisions about sizing, runtimes, and price/performance tiers.
• Define and improve the end-to-end developer journey across source repositories, container images, deployment, autoscaling, and observability, reducing friction across authentication, networking, registry, logs, and billing.
• Conduct customer discovery with developers, startups, and SMB platform teams; analyze support and community feedback and translate findings into jobs-to-be-done, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Own packaging and pricing, including metering compute, egress, build minutes, storage, invocations, and image pulls, and align pricing with cost to serve and product attachments.
• Partner with engineering on control-plane and data-plane architecture tradeoffs, including build pipelines, autoscaling, scheduling, function cold starts and concurrency, registry performance and garbage collection, and multi-region placement.
• Set and drive performance, reliability, and efficiency outcomes through clear SLOs and cost targets.
• Monitor competitors in managed compute and PaaS and identify opportunities to differentiate through simplicity and price/performance.
• Lead product launches with product marketing, documentation, sales, and support, and own post-launch adoption, activation, retention, and margin results.
• Track platform revenue and attach rate, infrastructure utilization and unit costs, gross margin, activation and retention, and reliability and performance against SLOs.

Benefits

• Annual bonus plan eligibility for non-sales roles, subject to plan terms and local eligibility; bonus amounts depend on company and individual performance.
• May be eligible for a new-hire equity grant, subject to plan terms and local eligibility.
• In participating countries, employees may have the opportunity to participate in the Employee Stock Purchase Program.
• Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education, subject to company policy.
• Flexible time off.
• Local team meetups.
• Mental health and well-being support.
• Professional development resources.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed