Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform

digitalocean98 | Cloud computing

1h 15m ago

Remote In-Country

Full Time

United States of America

$186.4k - $279.6k USD/yr

Title: Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform Location: Denver

Dive in and do the best work of your career at DigitalOcean. Journey alongside a strong community of top talent who are relentless in their drive to build the simplest scalable cloud. If you have a growth mindset, naturally like to think big and bold, and are energized by the fast-paced environment of a true industry disruptor, you’ll find your place here. We value winning together—while learning, having fun, and making a profound difference for the dreamers and builders in the world.

We are looking for a Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform who is passionate about running managed compute services at scale, namely App Platform, Serverless Functions, and Container Registry, and who understands that a great platform experience is built on well-run infrastructure underneath it.

As a Staff Product Manager, Compute Platform at DigitalOcean, you will join a dynamic team dedicated to revolutionizing cloud computing. You will own the product strategy and roadmap for App Platform, Serverless Functions, and Container Registry (DOCR), the managed compute services that turn DO's Droplet fleet into a place where developers can ship without thinking about servers. That means owning both sides of each service, the developer-facing product and the platform economics beneath it, such as how workloads are packed onto compute, what each app, function, or image pull costs to serve, and how processor, virtualization, and container runtime trends shape our roadmap. You will report to the Director of Product and partner day to day with the Hyderabad-based Compute Cloud Services engineering team that builds the business logic, APIs, and control plane for DO Compute, as well as with our Droplet/VPC, Kubernetes, and infrastructure product peers, finance, and GTM. The ideal person becomes the PM who can hold a customer conversation about deploy workflows in the morning and a capacity and margin conversation in the afternoon, the partner engineering trusts on architecture tradeoffs, and a core part of building out the compute platform PM group in India.

What you'll do:

Own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for App Platform, Serverless Functions, and DOCR, aligned with DO's overall compute platform strategy, and translate them into prioritized, well-scoped features that are simple to use and efficient to run.
Own the platform economics of these services. Define how apps, functions, and registry storage map onto Droplets and shared compute, track cost to serve per unit of customer workload, and drive utilization, density, and bin-packing improvements with engineering and finance.
Stay ahead of the compute landscape that underpins the platform, including processor roadmaps from Intel, AMD, and ARM, virtualization and microVM technologies, and container runtimes and isolation models, and translate those trends into platform decisions such as instance sizing, runtime choices, and price/performance tiers.
Define the end-to-end developer journey across these services, from source repo or container image to a deployed, autoscaled, observable app or function, and remove the seams (auth, networking, registry, logs, billing) that make customers stitch it together themselves today.
Work backwards from customers.
Run discovery with developers, startups, and SMB platform teams, mine support and community signal, and turn it into clear jobs-to-be-done, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
Own packaging and pricing for platform services, including how compute, egress, build minutes, storage, invocations, and image pulls are metered, how pricing tracks cost to serve, and how the services attach to Droplets, GPUs, managed databases, DOKS, and Spaces.
Partner with engineering on architecture tradeoffs in the control plane and data plane, such as build pipelines, autoscaling and scheduling behavior, cold start and concurrency for Serverless Functions, registry performance and garbage collection, and multi-region placement.
Drive performance, reliability, and efficiency outcomes with clear SLOs and cost targets, and champion the fixes that move them.
Monitor the competitive landscape for managed compute and PaaS offerings, and identify where DO can differentiate on simplicity, price/performance, or both.
Lead launches end to end with product marketing, docs, sales, and support, and own the results after GA, including adoption, activation, retention, and margin.

Key metrics

Platform services revenue and attach rate (share of Droplet, GPU, database, and DOKS customers also running App Platform or Serverless Functions, and share pulling from DOCR).
Infrastructure efficiency, measured as fleet utilization and density for the compute serving these services, and cost per unit of customer workload (per app instance, per invocation, per GB stored and pulled).
Gross margin per service, and the gap between pricing and cost to serve as the fleet and processor mix evolve.
Activation, retention, and expansion, measured as time to first deploy and as apps, functions, and registries active at 30/90/180 days.
Reliability and performance against SLO, e.g. deploy and build success rate, control plane availability, Serverless Functions cold start p95, image pull latency.

What You'll Add to DigitalOcean

8+ years of product management experience, with a proven track record defining and launching managed cloud compute, PaaS, serverless, or container products, ideally where you owned both the customer experience and the 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.
Compute fluency. A solid understanding of the cloud compute landscape, including CPU architectures (Intel, AMD, ARM) and their price/performance characteristics, virtualization and microVMs, container runtimes and isolation, and how these choices affect density, latency, and cost. You will not own the hardware roadmap, but you will make decisions that depend on it.
Cost and capacity acumen, including understanding of compute, memory, storage, and network cost drivers, the ability to build a cost-to-serve model for a multi-tenant service, and experience turning that model into pricing and utilization targets.
A strong developer-experience instinct and the ability to specify APIs, CLIs, and console flows that feel simple, with a bias toward defaults that work and escape hatches that do not fight the user.
Data-driven decision making, with the ability to define the right metrics, read utilization and margin dashboards alongside product dashboards, and change course when the numbers say so.
Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership, with a record of aligning engineering, infrastructure, finance, and GTM stakeholders across time zones.

Preferred:

Hands-on Kubernetes experience (cluster operations, workload scheduling, the operator and Helm ecosystem, or building a platform on top of it). You will not own DOKS, but many of our customers' workloads are
Kubernetes-shaped, and that background makes for better tradeoffs.
Prior experience on an IaaS or compute team, such as VM or bare metal product, capacity planning, or fleet efficiency, before or alongside platform work.
Experience shipping on or competing with Heroku, Render, Fly.io, Cloud Run, Lambda, Fargate, ECR/GCR/ACR, or similar.
Familiarity with datacenter fundamentals (rack layouts, power and cooling, network design) at the level needed to have a credible conversation with infrastructure teams.
Prior experience as an early or lead PM for a product area in a new geography.
Familiarity with DigitalOcean's existing product portfolio.

Compensation Range:

$186,400 - $279,600

*This is a remote role

JR: 2026-7857

#LI-Remote

Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean

We innovate with purpose. You’ll be a part of a cutting-edge technology company with an upward trajectory, who are proud to simplify cloud and AI so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world. As a member of the team, you will be a Shark who thinks big, bold, and scrappy, like an owner with a bias for action and a powerful sense of responsibility for customers, products, employees, and decisions.
We prioritize career development. At DO, you’ll do the best work of your career. You will work with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the industry. We are a high-performance organization that will always challenge you to think big. Our organizational development team will provide you with resources to ensure you keep growing. We provide employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education. All employees have access to LinkedIn Learning's 10,000+ courses to support their continued growth and development.
We care about your well-being. Regardless of your location, we will provide you with a competitive array of benefits to support you from our Employee Assistance Program to Local Employee Meetups to flexible time off policy, to name a few. While the philosophy around our benefits is the same worldwide, specific benefits may vary based on local regulations and preferences.
We reward our employees. The salary range for this position is based on market data, relevant years of experience, and skills. You may qualify for a bonus in addition to base salary; bonus amounts are determined based on company and individual performance. We also provide equity compensation to eligible employees, including equity grants upon hire and the option to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program.
DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.

Application Limit: You may apply to a maximum of 3 positions within any 180-day period. This policy promotes better role-candidate matching and encourages thoughtful applications where your qualifications align most strongly.

Required Languages

🇬🇧 English

What you'll do:

Own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for App Platform, Serverless Functions, and DOCR, aligned with DO's overall compute platform strategy, and translate them into prioritized, well-scoped features that are simple to use and efficient to run.

Own the platform economics of these services. Define how apps, functions, and registry storage map onto Droplets and shared compute, track cost to serve per unit of customer workload, and drive utilization, density, and bin-packing improvements with engineering and finance.

Stay ahead of the compute landscape that underpins the platform, including processor roadmaps from Intel, AMD, and ARM, virtualization and microVM technologies, and container runtimes and isolation models, and translate those trends into platform decisions such as instance sizing, runtime choices, and price/performance tiers.

Define the end-to-end developer journey across these services, from source repo or container image to a deployed, autoscaled, observable app or function, and remove the seams (auth, networking, registry, logs, billing) that make customers stitch it together themselves today.
Work backwards from customers.

Run discovery with developers, startups, and SMB platform teams, mine support and community signal, and turn it into clear jobs-to-be-done, user stories, and acceptance criteria.

Own packaging and pricing for platform services, including how compute, egress, build minutes, storage, invocations, and image pulls are metered, how pricing tracks cost to serve, and how the services attach to Droplets, GPUs, managed databases, DOKS, and Spaces.

Partner with engineering on architecture tradeoffs in the control plane and data plane, such as build pipelines, autoscaling and scheduling behavior, cold start and concurrency for Serverless Functions, registry performance and garbage collection, and multi-region placement.

Drive performance, reliability, and efficiency outcomes with clear SLOs and cost targets, and champion the fixes that move them.

Monitor the competitive landscape for managed compute and PaaS offerings, and identify where DO can differentiate on simplicity, price/performance, or both.

Lead launches end to end with product marketing, docs, sales, and support, and own the results after GA, including adoption, activation, retention, and margin.

Key metrics

Platform services revenue and attach rate (share of Droplet, GPU, database, and DOKS customers also running App Platform or Serverless Functions, and share pulling from DOCR).

Infrastructure efficiency, measured as fleet utilization and density for the compute serving these services, and cost per unit of customer workload (per app instance, per invocation, per GB stored and pulled).

Gross margin per service, and the gap between pricing and cost to serve as the fleet and processor mix evolve.

Activation, retention, and expansion, measured as time to first deploy and as apps, functions, and registries active at 30/90/180 days.

Reliability and performance against SLO, e.g. deploy and build success rate, control plane availability, Serverless Functions cold start p95, image pull latency.

What You'll Add to DigitalOcean

8+ years of product management experience, with a proven track record defining and launching managed cloud compute, PaaS, serverless, or container products, ideally where you owned both the customer experience and the 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.

Compute fluency. A solid understanding of the cloud compute landscape, including CPU architectures (Intel, AMD, ARM) and their price/performance characteristics, virtualization and microVMs, container runtimes and isolation, and how these choices affect density, latency, and cost. You will not own the hardware roadmap, but you will make decisions that depend on it.

Cost and capacity acumen, including understanding of compute, memory, storage, and network cost drivers, the ability to build a cost-to-serve model for a multi-tenant service, and experience turning that model into pricing and utilization targets.

A strong developer-experience instinct and the ability to specify APIs, CLIs, and console flows that feel simple, with a bias toward defaults that work and escape hatches that do not fight the user.

Data-driven decision making, with the ability to define the right metrics, read utilization and margin dashboards alongside product dashboards, and change course when the numbers say so.

Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership, with a record of aligning engineering, infrastructure, finance, and GTM stakeholders across time zones.

Preferred:

Hands-on Kubernetes experience (cluster operations, workload scheduling, the operator and Helm ecosystem, or building a platform on top of it). You will not own DOKS, but many of our customers' workloads are

Kubernetes-shaped, and that background makes for better tradeoffs.

Prior experience on an IaaS or compute team, such as VM or bare metal product, capacity planning, or fleet efficiency, before or alongside platform work.

Experience shipping on or competing with Heroku, Render, Fly.io, Cloud Run, Lambda, Fargate, ECR/GCR/ACR, or similar.

Familiarity with datacenter fundamentals (rack layouts, power and cooling, network design) at the level needed to have a credible conversation with infrastructure teams.

Prior experience as an early or lead PM for a product area in a new geography.

Familiarity with DigitalOcean's existing product portfolio.

Compensation Range:

$186,400 - $279,600

*This is a remote role

JR: 2026-7857

#LI-Remote

Why You’ll Like Working for DigitalOcean

We innovate with purpose. You’ll be a part of a cutting-edge technology company with an upward trajectory, who are proud to simplify cloud and AI so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world. As a member of the team, you will be a Shark who thinks big, bold, and scrappy, like an owner with a bias for action and a powerful sense of responsibility for customers, products, employees, and decisions.
We prioritize career development. At DO, you’ll do the best work of your career. You will work with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the industry. We are a high-performance organization that will always challenge you to think big. Our organizational development team will provide you with resources to ensure you keep growing. We provide employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education. All employees have access to LinkedIn Learning's 10,000+ courses to support their continued growth and development.
We care about your well-being. Regardless of your location, we will provide you with a competitive array of benefits to support you from our Employee Assistance Program to Local Employee Meetups to flexible time off policy, to name a few. While the philosophy around our benefits is the same worldwide, specific benefits may vary based on local regulations and preferences.
We reward our employees. The salary range for this position is based on market data, relevant years of experience, and skills. You may qualify for a bonus in addition to base salary; bonus amounts are determined based on company and individual performance. We also provide equity compensation to eligible employees, including equity grants upon hire and the option to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Program.
DigitalOcean is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.