Product Lead, Data Center

53 Stations; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 205,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Meter is seeking a Product Manager to define the data center switching line, partnering with hardware, firmware, and software engineering leadership. You will set technical and market direction for a new business line and own end-to-end outcomes from design to deployment for enterprise customers.

You will work directly with firmware and backend engineers on control plane and API design, influence hardware tradeoffs, and help build the team responsible for this product line.

Job description

You'll define how Meter builds and sells its first data center switching line.

You'll partner directly with our hardware team, who are already building our first top-of-rack and spine switches, and with engineering leadership across firmware and software. This is not a narrow feature-team PM role - you'll set technical and market direction for a business line that doesn't exist yet at Meter.

What we're building

We've extended Meter's hardware, firmware, and infrastructure platforms to include Ethernet top-of-rack and spine switching.

Paired with Meter's end-to-end delivery model, customers get one accountable operator instead of a stitched-together stack of vendors - the team that designs the hardware also writes the OS, builds the monitoring software, and runs the deployment. Pricing is tied to power consumption, which is how businesses actually buy data center capacity today. Learn more about our approach to automation at meter.ai.

What success looks like

In your first 6-12 months, you will:

• Work directly in the weeds with firmware and backend engineers on control plane design, API design, and observability - reviewing designs, reading code, and debugging alongside them, not just setting direction from a roadmap doc.
• Weigh in on hardware tradeoffs when they intersect with software (port density, thermal limits affecting firmware behavior), leaning on our hardware team's expertise rather than owning that judgment yourself.
• Help build the hiring plan and start assembling the engineering team responsible for the control plane, APIs, optics, and observability these switches depend on.
• Talking to prospective data center customers - enterprises standing up GPU clusters, not hyperscalers - about what they actually need and where the market is underserved.
• Staying current on data center networking research and bringing it back to Meter's engineering teams before it becomes a problem they hit blind.

Where this role can take you

As Meter's Data Center line grows past its first TOR and spine switches, this role grows into leading a larger product and engineering organization for the business - the same trajectory our switching and firewall product lines are on today.

Who you are

• You've built and shipped the firmware or software side of a data center networking platform, ideally as an engineer earlier in your career, and you've seen how control plane design, API design, and observability decisions play out in real deployments - not just in a spec.
• You know enough hardware to have an informed opinion - ASIC capabilities, port speed, power and thermal limits - but you're not trying to out-argue the hardware team on their own turf. You'll lean on them and learn the rest on the job.
• You'd rather be in the firmware repo or an incident channel with an engineer than in endless planning meetings. Low ego and you’ll roll up your sleeves to win.
• You bring engineering teams into alignment without needing formal authority. Hardware, firmware, and software leads treat you as a peer, not a checkpoint - and they trust what you tell them.
• You think in systems and sequence work in the right order, so the team isn't relearning the same lesson twice.
• You're known in the data center networking community - people you'd want to hire will recognize your name, and you're ambitious enough to want to scale something with them.

Why Meter

The internet runs the world. Every purchase you make, video call you join - it's all packets flowing through networks. But those networks haven't changed for decades. They're brittle, complex, and surprisingly hard to set up in an enterprise space.

We started Meter to build better networks. We had to build everything from the ground up: designing and building our own enterprise hardware, intuitive software, and streamlined operations to deliver great outcomes for our customers. Today, we build and deploy these networks at scale. Ambitious companies and enduring institutions like Bridgewater, Lyft, and Reddit rely on Meter to keep their thousands of employees and locations online and productive.

Our bet is simple: We will all use the internet more than we do today. We have the definitive networking stack to enable businesses to do so as seamlessly and reliably as any modern utility.

Compensation

• The estimated base salary for this role is between $205,000 - $270,000.
• Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Meter's equity plan.