Staff Product Manager, Acquisition

Aptible, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Aptible, Inc. is seeking a dynamic Product Manager to set strategy, roadmap, and feature definition for the secure PaaS in the AI-native era. You will partner closely with engineering, design, and marketing to deliver customer value and drive business growth.

In this role you will lead discovery, define a clear roadmap, and ensure alignment across teams. A startup mindset with strategic sense is essential to navigate an evolving landscape.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience as a Product Manager
• 3+ years experience in PaaS / Developer Tools space
• Ability to communicate with technical customers without engineering translators

Responsibilities

• Define product requirements based on discovery outcomes
• Collaborate with engineering and design to validate product risk
• Partner with Marketing and CS to position the product and go-to-market

Skills

Execution

Impact

Ownership

Product Judgment

Intuition

Technical Translation

Communication

Job description

About Aptible

Large language models are transforming software engineering — developers can now go from idea to code faster than ever. But that speed cuts both ways: AI makes attackers more capable, zero-days weaponize faster, and AI-assisted "vibe coding" is shipping more code with less security review. Deployment, observability, cost, security, reliability — all of that has to scale too, and LLMs don't yet solve the problem.

That's where Aptible comes in. Since 2014, our cloud delivery platform has been automating security, compliance and reliability for engineering teams whose apps handle the most sensitive data, in the most highly regulated industries. The future of Aptible is to be the safe place to run both traditional and AI-native applications: isolated from lateral movement, defended against known and emerging vulnerabilities, and instrumented so that if something does go wrong, the blast radius is contained and the forensics are already in place.

The need for a platform like Aptible has never been greater. If you're passionate about cloud infrastructure and ensuring DevOps evolves to meet the pressure of AI-assisted development — and you're excited to join a small and highly talented team — we’d love to hear from you.

NEW! Aptible is part of Opti9 Technologies, a cloud solutions provider specializing in managed cloud, security, disaster recovery, and compliance. Joining forces with Opti9 gives Aptible the resources to invest more aggressively in the platform — expanding what we can deliver to the engineering teams who depend on it.

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

We see great value in bringing together a team with different perspectives, educational backgrounds, and life experiences, and we prioritize diversity within our team. We encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply.

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About This Role

We’re looking for a dynamic Product Manager who can set the strategy, roadmap, and feature definition that expands our positioning as the secure PaaS for the AI-native era, for both traditional and generative/agentic applications. In this role, you will partner closely with our engineering team, product designer, and marketing team to:

1. Build something our target customers want (create value), and


2. Build something that helps us strategically grow the business (capture value)

This PM is responsible for Acquisition (measured by new customers), and will work alongside the PM for Retention (measured by NDR).

What You’ll Do

There are two types of outcomes this role will be accountable for:

1. (Quantitative) Business outcomes/Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
   
   
   
   • Product signups and new product-led customer conversions
   
   
   • Count of customers using features delivered against the Acquisition roadmap, across LLM Gateway and PaaS
   
   
   • New ARR ($) from features delivered against the Acquisition roadmap
   
   
   
   


2. (Qualitative) Role-based outcomes in these criteria:
   Discovery: figuring out the right product to build
   
   
   
   • Define the discovery process and align stakeholders around it. Communicate learnings with the broader team
   
   
   • Collaborate with engineering and design to identify and validate product risk:
     
     
     
     • You will:
     
     
     • De-risk Value (will users use or buy it?)
     
     
     • and De-risk Business Viability (does the solution work for our business?)
     
     
     
     
   
   
   • Engineering: De-risk Feasibility (can we build it?)
   
   
   • Design: De-risk Usability (can users figure out how to use it?)
   
   
   • Define a clear roadmap of features (or product “bets”)
   
   
   
   Delivery: Helping the team get the product built and in the hands of customers
   
   
   
   • Define product requirements for features based on the outcome of discovery
   
   
   • Empower engineering and design to build the product, unblocking implementation as needed in a timely manner
   
   
   • Empower Marketing and CS to put our product in front of users by providing foundational resources such as (but not limited to):
     
     
     
     • Pricing
     
     
     • ICP
     
     
     • Documentation
     
     
     
     
   
   
   
   Analytics: Measuring and analyzing how our customers use our product
   
   
   
   • Define data sources and success metrics, working with BizOps to set up dashboards and monitoring
   
   
   • Analyze adoption, engagement and usage patterns
   
   
   
   

You Should Apply If

Overall Professional Experience

• Functional Experience: You have 10+ years of experience as a Product Manager.


• Technical Acumen: You have 3+ years of experience in the PaaS / Developer Tools space, either as a Product Manager or other relevant role (e.g. Software Engineer). You can speak the language of our customers without having to go through our Engineering Team as translators.

Startup Compatibility

• Driver Mindset: You’re motivated to steer direction for a small, highly collaborative team. You don't let bumps in the road stop you: you identify what's blocking you, take ownership, and drive to get unblocked.


• Going 0 → 1: This isn’t an environment where interviewees are lined up to talk to you. You’re:
  
  
  
  • Eager to go out and find customers to interview, or use judgment and market research to quickly glean what customers want
  
  
  • Have a high degree of empathy for listening to and understanding customers
  
  
  • Can be scrappy and experimental (with design, eng, prototypes, surveys, etc) to figure out what’s worth building, and
  
  
  • Are comfortable navigating that “early-stage” ambiguity
  
  
  
  


• Strategic Sense: You have real experience operating in a fast-evolving landscape. You know what it's like when the ground shifts under a product every few months, and you make progress without waiting for things to settle. You use that instinct to position our product strategically, thinking about go-to-market and how the value we create actually gets captured.

Core Competencies

What skills are most important for this role at Aptible?

• Execution: You keep all stakeholders aligned around one vision, strategy, and roadmap.


• Impact: You have a track record of success setting and hitting aggressive goals that move core metrics.


• Ownership: You hold yourself and the team accountable in all conditions without excuses.


• Product Judgment & Intuition: You bring together insights to design and build the best product experience.


• Technical Translation: You speak fluently about technical features with technical customers, identify X/Y problems, and synthesize low-level feedback into strategic product direction.


• Communication: You demonstrate strong verbal and written communication skills with all stakeholders.

Location: You are located in the contiguous United States.

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Aptible's Employee Benefits

Aptible's Values & Principles

Why Aptible

Aptible has been around for over a decade. We have a real product, real customers who depend on it, and a profitable business. We're not a rocketship chasing hypergrowth — we're a small, tight-knit team doing meaningful work in a complex system. Together, we wield genuine ownership to drive lasting impact: the kind where our work shapes the whole product, not just a corner of it.

We'll be honest: this isn't an "everything is figured out" moment. We're navigating real change, with more on the way -- and we're doing it together. We're not looking for someone who thinks they have all the answers already. We're looking for someone who wants to find them with us.

What keeps us here is each other. We're a team that genuinely cares — about the work, the customers (and the cool things they’re building), and each other. If you want to do hard things alongside people you actually like and respect, and leave a lasting mark on a system that matters, this is that place.

Interview Process

We want to make the experience of interviewing with us as delightful, efficient, fair, respectful, and transparent as possible. A typical process at Aptible might include the following steps. Please note that this may vary by role, and details will be provided to you early on in the process.

1. Introduction to Aptible with the Hiring Manager


2. 2-3 Skills-Based Interviews with Aptible Team Members


3. Take-Home Project (You will be compensated for completing this)


4. References


5. Final in-person onsite (Role depending)

If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let your Recruiter and/or Hiring Manager know.

AI at Aptible

tl;dr — Aptible is a good fit for pragmatic AI skeptics and for AI enthusiasts who are clear-eyed about its limitations and risks.

We are a security and compliance company, and our primary goal is to make it easy for our customers to stay secure and compliant in the cloud. To do that these days, we simply have to have our hands in AI. There's no avoiding it.

We don't believe that AI is the answer to everything. In fact, we carry healthy skepticism about it and have clear eyes about its negative impacts on society, the environment, engineering culture, and more.

But we engage with it for two reasons:

1. Because our customers do. And to best serve them, we need expertise in AI use, AI risk, AI development, and more.


2. Because sometimes AI is the right tool for the job, and sometimes it accelerates our work. And at heart, we are pragmatists.

Aptible is a good fit if you're someone who can hold multiple ideas at once about AI -- the utility and the risk, the potential and the cost, enthusiasm and skepticism. If you're categorically opposed to working with it in any form or an unbridled enthusiast, this probably isn't the right fit.

AI Usage in the Interview Process

At Aptible, AI is part of how we work every day. We treat it like any other development tool — powerful, expected, and entirely the responsibility of the person using it. Use it with discernment, knowing that you still own the results.

Here’s what we expect from you:

• Your resume — Don't submit AI-generated resumes. They will be discarded. Concise and real wins with us. (Why? We review a high volume of applications and aren’t using AI for application review. Our human reviewers can't parse through templated, bloated submissions, and resumes highly tailored to the keywords of our JDs don’t hold weight for our reviewers)


• Live conversations — Don't use real-time AI to generate answers that read off to us. It’s obvious, and we'll end the interview. Honest and real wins with us. (Why? These are human interactions. We're evaluating you — how you think, how you communicate, how you engage)


• Technical topics/work — Use any tools you normally would, including AI agents. But be honest about what you used, be discerning about what AI outputs, and be ready to explain your thinking. AI output refined by human judgment wins with us. (Why? We want to see what real work looks like. And real work includes shaping what comes from AI, not just accepting it)