Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform

DigitalOcean • San Francisco, CA

19h • Remote

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 enable developers to deploy applications without managing servers. The role spans both the developer-facing experience and the platform economics beneath it, including workload placement on compute, cost to serve, utilization, and the impact 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 in Droplets/VPC, Kubernetes, and infrastructure, as well as finance and go-to-market teams. The successful candidate will connect customer needs and deploy workflows with capacity, architecture, reliability, and margin decisions, and help build out the compute platform product management group.

The role owns the end-to-end developer journey, service packaging and pricing, and performance, reliability, and efficiency outcomes. It includes customer discovery, cross-functional architecture and roadmap work, competitive analysis, and leading launches through post-launch measurement of adoption, activation, retention, and margin. This is a remote role.

Requirements

• 8+ years of product management experience.
• Proven track 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 build, storage, and distribution.
• Solid 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.
• Understanding of compute, memory, storage, and network cost drivers; ability to build a cost-to-serve model for a multi-tenant service and use it 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, interpreting utilization and margin dashboards alongside product dashboards, and adjusting plans based on evidence.
• 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, including 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 such as rack layouts, power and cooling, and network design sufficient for credible discussions with infrastructure teams.
• 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, aligning them with DigitalOcean's compute platform strategy and translating them into prioritized, well-scoped features.
• Own platform economics, including mapping workloads and registry storage onto Droplets and shared compute, measuring cost to serve, and improving utilization, density, and bin-packing with engineering and finance.
• Track processor, virtualization, microVM, container-runtime, and isolation trends and translate them into platform decisions such as instance sizing, runtime choices, and price/performance tiers.
• Define and improve the end-to-end developer journey from source repository or container image through deployment, autoscaling, and observability, addressing seams across authentication, networking, registry, logs, and billing.
• Conduct customer discovery with developers, startups, and SMB platform teams; analyze support and community feedback; and turn 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, aligning pricing with cost to serve and product attachment across DigitalOcean services.
• 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.
• Drive performance, reliability, and efficiency outcomes using clear SLOs and cost targets, and champion improvements.
• Monitor competitors in managed compute and PaaS and identify opportunities to differentiate through simplicity and price/performance.
• Lead launches with product marketing, documentation, sales, and support, and own post-launch results including adoption, activation, retention, and margin.
• Track platform revenue and attachment, fleet utilization and density, cost per unit of workload, gross margin, activation, retention, expansion, and reliability and performance against SLOs.

Benefits

• Annual bonus plan eligibility for non-sales roles, subject to plan terms and local eligibility.
• Possible new-hire equity grant, subject to plan terms, approval, and local eligibility.
• Employee Stock Purchase Program opportunity in participating countries.
• Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education, subject to company policy.
• Benefits may include flexible time off, local team meetups, and mental health and well-being support; specific benefits and eligibility vary by location.

What This Job Offers

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