Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform

DigitalOcean • Denver, CO

2h • $186,400 - $279,600 • 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 help developers deploy applications without managing servers. The role spans both the customer-facing product experience and the underlying platform economics, including workload placement, cost to serve, infrastructure utilization, and the effects of processor, virtualization, and container-runtime developments on product decisions.

The Staff Product Manager will work with the Hyderabad-based Compute Cloud Services engineering team and partner with peers in Droplets/VPC, Kubernetes, and infrastructure, as well as Finance and go-to-market teams. The role requires connecting developer workflows with capacity, cost, and margin considerations; shaping architecture and product tradeoffs; and helping build the compute platform product management group.

The position owns service packaging and pricing, developer journeys, performance and reliability goals, and launches through post-launch outcomes. Success is measured through service revenue and attach rate, infrastructure utilization and workload cost, gross margin, customer activation and retention, and reliability and performance against SLOs. This is a remote role.

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 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 effects on density, latency, and cost.
• Cost and capacity acumen, including understanding compute, memory, storage, and network cost drivers; ability to model cost to serve for a multi-tenant service and translate the model into 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 results.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership, including experience 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, working 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 product 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 per unit of workload, and driving utilization, density, and bin-packing improvements.
• Track processor, virtualization, microVM, container-runtime, and isolation-model developments and translate relevant trends into platform decisions.
• Define and improve the end-to-end developer journey from source repository or container image to deployed, autoscaled, observable application or function.
• 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 compute, egress, build minutes, storage, invocations, and image pulls, and aligning pricing with cost to serve.
• 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, scheduling, Serverless Functions cold starts and concurrency, registry performance and garbage collection, and multi-region placement.
• Set and drive performance, reliability, and efficiency outcomes through clear 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-GA adoption, activation, retention, and margin outcomes.

Benefits

• Annual bonus plan eligibility for non-sales roles, subject to plan terms and local eligibility; bonus amounts depend on company and individual performance.
• May be eligible for a new-hire equity grant, subject to plan terms, approval, and local eligibility.
• Flexible time off.
• Local team meetups.
• Mental health and well-being support.
• Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education, subject to company policy.
• 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