Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform

DigitalOcean • Boston, MA

20h • $186,400 - $279,600 • Remote

About The Position

DigitalOcean is seeking a Staff Product Manager to own product strategy and the roadmap for App Platform, Serverless Functions, and Container Registry (DOCR). These managed compute services help developers deploy applications without managing servers. The role covers both the developer-facing experience and the underlying platform economics, including workload placement, cost to serve, utilization, density, and how processor, virtualization, and container-runtime developments affect product decisions.

The position reports to the Director of Product and works closely with the Hyderabad-based Compute Cloud Services engineering team, product peers across Droplets/VPC, Kubernetes, and infrastructure, as well as finance and go-to-market teams. The product manager will connect customer needs and developer workflows with infrastructure architecture, capacity, performance, reliability, and margin considerations.

The role defines the end-to-end developer journey across the services, from a source repository or container image to a deployed, autoscaled, observable application or function. It also owns packaging and pricing, service launches and post-launch outcomes, and product metrics including revenue, attach rate, utilization, cost per workload, gross margin, activation, retention, reliability, and performance. This is a remote role.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of product management experience.
• A 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 deployments, 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 their price/performance characteristics, 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 model cost to serve for a multi-tenant service and turn the model into pricing and utilization targets.
• Strong developer-experience instincts and ability to specify simple APIs, CLIs, and console flows, with useful defaults and user-friendly escape hatches.
• Data-driven decision-making skills, including defining metrics and interpreting utilization, margin, and product dashboards.
• 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 products, 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.
• Prior experience as an early or lead product manager 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 product strategy into prioritized, well-scoped features that are simple to use and efficient to operate.
• Own platform economics, including workload mapping to Droplets and shared compute, cost-to-serve measurement, utilization, density, and bin-packing improvements.
• Track processor, virtualization, microVM, container-runtime, and isolation-model developments and translate them into platform decisions such as instance sizing, runtime choices, and price/performance tiers.
• Define the end-to-end developer journey from source repository or container image through deployment, autoscaling, and observability, and remove friction across authentication, networking, registry, logs, and billing.
• Conduct customer discovery with developers, startups, and SMB platform teams; use support and community input to develop jobs-to-be-done, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Own packaging and pricing, including metering for 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 using SLOs and cost targets.
• Monitor competitors in managed compute and PaaS and identify opportunities to differentiate on simplicity and price/performance.
• Lead product launches with product marketing, documentation, sales, and support; own post-GA adoption, activation, retention, and margin outcomes.
• Track platform revenue and attach rate, fleet utilization and density, cost per workload unit, service gross margin, activation, retention, and reliability and performance against SLOs.

Benefits

• Annual bonus plan eligibility for non-sales roles, subject to plan terms and local eligibility.
• Potential eligibility for a new-hire equity grant, subject to plan terms and local eligibility.
• Employee Stock Purchase Program opportunity in participating countries, subject to applicable plan terms.
• Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education, subject to company policy.
• Flexible time off.
• Local team meetups.
• Mental health and well-being support.

What This Job Offers

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