Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform

DigitalOcean • Denver, CO

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 DigitalOcean Container Registry (DOCR). These managed compute services help developers deploy applications without managing servers. The role combines ownership of the developer-facing experience with responsibility for platform economics, including workload placement, utilization, density, and cost to serve. 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, and partners in finance and go-to-market.

The Product Manager will shape the end-to-end developer journey from source repository or container image through deployment, autoscaling, and observability; guide architecture and platform decisions in response to compute and runtime trends; and set service packaging, pricing, reliability, performance, and efficiency goals. Success is measured through revenue and product attachment, infrastructure efficiency, service gross margin, customer activation and retention, and reliability and performance against SLOs. The role also leads launches through general availability and owns post-launch results.

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 responsibility for 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.
• Understanding of cloud compute, including Intel, AMD, and ARM CPU architectures and their price/performance characteristics; virtualization and microVMs; container runtimes and isolation; and the effects of these choices on density, latency, and cost.
• Cost and capacity acumen, including knowledge of 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 APIs, CLIs, and console flows with useful defaults and appropriate escape hatches.
• Data-driven decision-making skills, including defining metrics, interpreting utilization and margin dashboards alongside product dashboards, and changing course based on results.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership, including aligning engineering, infrastructure, finance, and GTM stakeholders across time zones.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on Kubernetes experience, such as cluster operations, workload scheduling, experience with operators and Helm, 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 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, aligned with DigitalOcean’s compute platform strategy.
• Translate strategy into prioritized, well-scoped features that are simple to use and efficient to operate.
• Own platform economics, including mapping workloads and registry storage onto Droplets and shared compute, tracking cost to serve, and improving utilization, density, and bin-packing with engineering and finance.
• Monitor 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 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 establish jobs-to-be-done, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Own service packaging and pricing, including metering compute, egress, build minutes, storage, invocations, and image pulls, and connect pricing to cost to serve and product attachment across DigitalOcean offerings.
• 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 by setting SLOs and cost targets and advocating for improvements.
• 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 attachment, compute utilization and density, cost per workload unit, gross margin, customer activation and retention, and reliability and performance against SLOs.

Benefits

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

What This Job Offers

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