Confluent - Senior Product Manager, Cloud Networking

IBM Computing; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software in the United States is seeking a Senior Product Manager for the Confluent Cloud Network team to drive private networking initiatives and a scalable product experience.

You will partner with engineering, design, sales, and marketing to define roadmaps, user journeys, and measurable outcomes across cloud services.

The role emphasizes building trusted relationships worldwide and delivering high-impact networking features for a SaaS platform.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a Product Manager with focus on cloud technologies.
• Experience building and supporting enterprise-grade products.
• Experience building, writing, maintaining and defending a clear product roadmap and backlog backed by user stories and customer research.
• Excellent analytical, communication & collaboration skills.
• Ability to build relationships with co-workers and customers located around the world.
• Demonstrated ability to drive business outcomes through product changes.

Responsibilities

• Understand our users: conduct interviews and analyze data to define personas, user journeys, and jobs to be done.
• Drive the Cloud Networking product roadmap with focus on private networking and cost efficiency.
• Define interfaces powering API, CLI and Terraform and launch new network options.
• Be responsible for the whole lifecycle: drive multi-team initiatives from conception to delivery and iteration.
• Close the loop: define targets, measure performance, and share results with stakeholders.
• Manage complexity in a rapidly evolving product and ambitious partnerships.

Skills

Product management

Cloud technologies

Roadmap & backlog

Stakeholder management

Communication

Global collaboration

Data analysis

Education

MBA

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Envoy

Job description

Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

Your role and responsibilities

About the Role:

Confluent Cloud delivers a complete end-to-end streaming experience via a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. To deliver a simple, understandable, and scalable product experience requires abstracting the complex interactions of underlying cloud infrastructure, networking, storage, and compute powering a stateful distributed system.

As a Senior Product Manager on the Cloud Networking Product team, you’ll contribute to the mission of making connectivity to and from Confluent Cloud reliable, scalable, secure, cost efficient and simple to use so that users can focus on building streaming applications instead of managing infrastructure. Cloud networking with focus on private networking is an enabler for all services offered on Confluent Cloud and is a strategic investment area for Confluent with the potential to impact the company’s top and bottom lines.

You’ll be responsible for the success of major product initiatives, from initial conception to execution and launch. You’ll become the trusted resource for your product, making sure that the engineering, design, sales, and marketing have what they need to make the right tradeoffs, build the right product, and grow it successfully in the market.

What You Will Do

• Understand our users: Conduct interviews and analyze data to define personas, user journeys, and key jobs to be done.

• Drive crucial aspects of Confluent Cloud Network Roadmap supporting Confluent Cloud services like Kafka, Flink, Connectors, Data Governance, etc with a heavy focus on user experience and cost efficiency.

• Define flexible interfaces powering API, CLI and Terraform, data models, and processes and launch a variety of new network options and rapidly iterate on existing ones

• Be responsible for the whole lifecycle: Drive multi-team, cross-functional initiatives from conception through initial delivery and ongoing iteration after launch.

• Close the loop: Define quantitative and qualitative targets, measure performance against them, share results with stakeholders, and incorporate those learnings into the product.

• Manage complexity: Deliver value while handling the surprises and challenges of a quickly evolving product, ambitious partnership targets, and a rapidly growing organization.

Required technical and professional expertise

• 5+ years of experience as a Product Manager with focus on cloud technologies.

• Experience building and supporting enterprise-grade products as a product manager, engineer or solutions architect.

• Experience building, writing, maintaining and defending a clear product roadmap and backlog backed by user stories and customer research.

• Excellent analytical, communication & collaboration skills.

• Ability to build relationships with co-workers and customers located around the world.

• Demonstrated ability to drive business outcomes through product changes.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• 6+ years of experience in Networking in a PM or technical role

• Experience with enabling AWS/Azure/GCP private networking features such as Private Link, VPC Peering, Transit Gateway, etc for a SaaS product.

• Experience with Envoy, Service Mesh, DNS and Kubernetes Networking.

• Experience with network traffic metering and billing.

• Domain expertise in networking technologies combined with Product Management experience. An MBA degree is a plus.

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.