Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform

DigitalOcean • Austin, TX

21h • $186,400 - $279,600 • Remote

About The Position

DigitalOcean is seeking a Staff Product Manager to own the 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 the customer-facing experience and the underlying platform economics, including workload placement, cost to serve, utilization, density, and the effects of processor, virtualization, and container-runtime developments.

The Product Manager reports to the Director of Product and works closely with the Hyderabad-based Compute Cloud Services engineering team, product peers in Droplet/VPC, Kubernetes, and infrastructure, and stakeholders in finance and go-to-market. The role connects developer workflows with capacity, architecture, and margin considerations, and contributes to building DigitalOcean's compute platform product management group.

The position is remote. Compensation is $186,400 to $279,600 in base salary. The role is eligible for DigitalOcean's annual bonus plan and may be eligible for a new-hire equity grant, subject to plan terms and local eligibility. DigitalOcean also describes professional development reimbursement, flexible time off, local team meetups, and mental health and well-being support; specific benefits and eligibility vary by location.

Requirements

• 8+ years of product management experience, with a track record defining and launching managed cloud compute, PaaS, serverless, or container products; ideally including ownership of 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.
• Understanding of cloud compute, including Intel, AMD, and ARM CPU architectures and their price/performance characteristics, virtualization and microVMs, container runtimes and isolation, and their effects on density, latency, and cost.
• Cost and capacity expertise, including compute, memory, storage, and network cost drivers; ability to build multi-tenant service cost-to-serve models and use them to set pricing and utilization targets.
• Strong developer-experience instincts and ability to specify simple APIs, CLIs, and console workflows, 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 products.
• 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, and translate strategy into prioritized, well-scoped features.
• Manage platform economics by defining how services map onto Droplets and shared compute, measuring cost to serve, and driving utilization, density, and bin-packing improvements with engineering and finance.
• Track developments in Intel, AMD, and ARM processors, virtualization and microVM technologies, container runtimes, and isolation models, and translate them into platform decisions.
• 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; analyze support and community feedback; and 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.
• Drive performance, reliability, and efficiency outcomes using SLOs and cost targets, and champion 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.

Benefits

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

What This Job Offers

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