Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform

DigitalOcean • Seattle, WA

23h • $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 Container Registry (DOCR). These managed compute services help developers deploy applications without managing servers. The role covers both developer-facing product experiences and the underlying platform economics, including workload placement, cost to serve, compute utilization, and the effects of processor, virtualization, and container-runtime trends.

The position reports to the Director of Product and partners closely with the Hyderabad-based Compute Cloud Services engineering team, product peers across Droplets/VPC, Kubernetes, and infrastructure, and finance and go-to-market teams. The successful candidate will connect customer-facing deploy workflows with capacity, cost, and margin decisions; contribute to architecture tradeoffs; and help build the compute platform product management group.

The role defines end-to-end developer journeys, service packaging and pricing, and performance, reliability, and efficiency goals. It leads launches through general availability and owns results including adoption, activation, retention, and margin. Success is measured through service revenue and attach rate, infrastructure utilization and cost per workload, gross margin, customer activation and retention, and reliability and performance against SLOs.

This is a hybrid role. Compensation is $186,400–$279,600. Eligible non-sales employees may participate in the annual bonus plan and may be eligible for a new-hire equity grant, subject to plan terms and local eligibility. The benefits package may include flexible time off, local team meetups, mental health and well-being support, and reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education, subject to company policy; offerings vary by location and eligibility.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of product management experience.
• 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 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.
• Understanding of compute, memory, storage, and network cost drivers; ability to build cost-to-serve models for multi-tenant services and use them to set pricing and utilization targets.
• Strong developer-experience instincts and ability to specify simple APIs, CLIs, and console flows, with effective 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 offerings.
• Familiarity with datacenter fundamentals such as 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, and translate them into prioritized, well-scoped features.
• Own platform economics, including mapping workloads and registry storage to compute, tracking cost to serve, and improving utilization, density, and bin-packing with engineering and finance.
• Monitor processor, virtualization, microVM, container-runtime, and isolation-model developments and translate them into platform decisions about instance sizing, runtime choices, and price/performance tiers.
• Define and improve the end-to-end developer journey from source repository or container image to deployed, autoscaled, observable applications and functions; reduce friction across authentication, networking, registry, logs, and billing.
• Conduct customer discovery with developers, startups, and SMB platform teams; use support and community feedback to define 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 attachment opportunities.
• Partner with engineering on control-plane and data-plane architecture tradeoffs, including build pipelines, autoscaling and scheduling, function cold starts and concurrency, registry performance and garbage collection, and multi-region placement.
• Set and drive performance, reliability, and efficiency outcomes through SLOs and cost targets.
• Monitor competitors in managed compute and PaaS and identify opportunities to differentiate on simplicity and price/performance.
• Lead launches with product marketing, documentation, sales, and support, and own post-launch adoption, activation, retention, and margin results.
• Track platform revenue and attach rate, fleet utilization and density, cost per unit of workload, 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.
• 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 may be included, depending on location and eligibility.
• Local team meetups may be included, depending on location and eligibility.
• Mental health and well-being support may be included, depending on location and eligibility.

What This Job Offers

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