Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform

DigitalOcean • Austin, TX

8d • Remote

About The Position

DigitalOcean is hiring 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 without managing servers. The role combines developer-facing product experience with the economics and infrastructure beneath the services, including workload placement, cost to serve, utilization, and the effects of processor, virtualization, and container-runtime trends.

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 define the end-to-end developer journey, guide control-plane and data-plane tradeoffs, own packaging and pricing, and drive reliability, performance, adoption, and margin outcomes. Success is measured through revenue and attach rate, infrastructure utilization and cost per workload, gross margin, activation and retention, and service reliability and performance.

This is a remote role. The compensation range 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. Benefits 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. Benefits and eligibility vary by location.

Requirements

• At least 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.
• Understanding of cloud compute, including Intel, AMD, and ARM CPU architectures and their price/performance characteristics; virtualization and microVMs; container runtimes and isolation; and how these choices affect density, latency, and cost.
• Cost and capacity acumen, including understanding compute, memory, storage, and network cost drivers; ability to build a cost-to-serve model for a multi-tenant service; and experience translating that model into pricing and utilization targets.
• Strong developer-experience instincts and ability to specify APIs, CLIs, and console flows that are simple to use, with effective defaults and suitable escape hatches.
• Data-driven decision-making skills, including defining appropriate metrics, interpreting utilization and margin dashboards alongside product dashboards, and changing course when data indicates it is needed.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership, including a record of 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, including rack layouts, power and cooling, and network design, sufficient to engage credibly 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, aligned with DigitalOcean’s compute platform strategy.
• Translate the product strategy into prioritized, well-scoped features that are simple to use and efficient to run.
• Own platform economics, including mapping apps, functions, and registry storage onto Droplets and shared compute; tracking cost to serve per unit of workload; and driving utilization, density, and bin-packing improvements with engineering and finance.
• Track processor roadmaps, virtualization and microVM technologies, container runtimes, and isolation models, translating relevant trends into decisions about instance sizing, runtime choices, and price/performance tiers.
• Define the end-to-end developer journey from source repository or container image to a deployed, autoscaled, observable app or function, and remove friction across authentication, networking, registry, logs, and billing.
• Conduct customer discovery with developers, startups, and SMB platform teams; examine 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; align pricing with cost to serve; and determine how the services attach to Droplets, GPUs, managed databases, DOKS, and Spaces.
• Partner with engineering on control-plane and data-plane architecture tradeoffs, including build pipelines, autoscaling and scheduling, Serverless Functions 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 championing improvements.
• Monitor competing managed compute and PaaS offerings and identify opportunities to differentiate on simplicity and price/performance.
• Lead launches end to end with product marketing, documentation, sales, and support, and own post-launch adoption, activation, retention, and margin results.
• Track platform-services revenue and attach rate, fleet utilization and density, cost per unit of workload, service gross margin, activation and retention, and reliability and performance against SLOs.

Benefits

• 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; availability and eligibility vary by location.
• 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, employees may have the opportunity to participate in the Employee Stock Purchase Program, subject to applicable plan terms.

What This Job Offers

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