Product Owner - Imunify Email (remote work)

CloudLinux is the maker of Imunify360 - a suite of security products protecting millions of websites across the web hosting industry. Our email security line covers both sides of the email problem for hosting providers: an inbound anti-spam engine integrated with hosting control panels, and an outbound SMTP gateway that protects sender reputation and keeps legitimate mail out of the spam folder.

We are looking for a Product Owner to run the team that builds and operates this product line. You will lead a small, senior, fully remote squad (currently 7-8 people: Go and Python engineers, a deliverability engineer, an anti-spam engineer, and data analysis/annotation) and be accountable for what the team ships, how reliably it runs, and how the people on it grow.

This is a hands-on lead role, not a pure people-management role. Expect roughly 60% leadership (delivery, technical direction, coaching, incident command) and 40% hands-on engineering (design reviews, code review, spikes, production debugging). You are not expected to be the top individual contributor on the team - you are expected to be able to read every part of the system and hold a credible technical opinion about it.

You don't need to arrive as an email expert. If you have led engineers in an adjacent technical domain - infrastructure, networking, security, messaging, anti-abuse - and have a track record of getting deep into complex technical territory fast, we will teach you the email side.

The system you would inherit

• Inbound filtering: an Rspamd-based engine with a trained rule/ML model, released on a regular retraining cycle and measured on spam catch rate and false-positive rate.
• Outbound gateway: a Halon-based SMTP relay with per-domain warm-up ladders, rate limiting, quarantine, feedback-loop (ARF) processing, and a customer portal - Go services on bare metal.
• Panel integrations: cPanel/WHM, Plesk, DirectAdmin, plus Debian/Postfix deployments for large hosting partners.
• Data plane: Elasticsearch, Redis, Grafana dashboards and alerting, corpus and annotation pipelines feeding model training.
• Delivery: GitLab, Jenkins, Jira, weekly release cadence, blameless post-mortems within 24 hours.

What you will own

Delivery:

• Turn the product backlog into a credible, sequenced engineering plan - estimates, dependencies, and a release train the team actually hits.
• Run the team's weekly cadence: planning, release readiness, status reporting with real numbers rather than adjectives.
• Own engineering quality gates for model releases: no detection model ships without a measured catch rate and false-positive deltas against the previous model, and a rollback path.
• Keep technical debt visible and funded - negotiate it into the roadmap rather than absorbing it silently.
• Report delivery status and risk to engineering leadership weekly; every item carries an owner and a due date.

Technical direction:

• Own the architecture of the email stack together with the architecture group: review designs, write and approve ADRs, and make build-vs-buy calls with explicit trade-offs.
• Review code and designs on the critical path - mail flow, rate limiting, quarantine, authentication - and set the bar for tests, observability, and safe rollout.
• Own production health: SLOs, alerting, capacity, and the deliverability posture of our sending infrastructure (IP reputation, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, rDNS, RBL listings).
• Act as incident commander for product-impacting events: coordinate remediation across teams, keep partners informed, and author the post-mortem within 24 hours with named owners and dates.

People:

• Lead a distributed team across the globe: 1:1s, goal setting, performance reviews, and career development.
• Hire: define the profile, run technical interviews, onboard, and mentor engineers
• Set the working agreements that make async work - written decisions, public-by-default communication, durable artifacts over meetings.

AI-augmented engineering:

We evaluate engineers here partly on how effectively they work with coding agents. As the lead you are expected to model and coach this: prompt specificity, review quality on agent-generated code, tool-boundary awareness, context provision, iteration effectiveness, error recovery, and end-to-end task completion. The team has already scaffolded its repositories for agent-assisted development; extending that to the model and rule pipelines is live work

First 90 days:

• 30 days: Own the release train and the weekly status; be able to trace an inbound message and an outbound message end to end through the stack; complete 1:1s with every team member and produce a written read on the team's strengths and gaps.
• 60 days: Own on-call and incident command for the product line; publish the current SLOs and the top three reliability risks with mitigations; land at least one non-trivial change yourself.
• 90 days: Present a technical roadmap for the email stack agreed with the PO and the architecture group, including a debt-paydown line item and a staffing recommendation.

Requirements

Must have:

• 5+ years as a software engineer, with 2+ years leading a team of engineers (team lead, tech lead with people responsibility, or engineering manager) in a product company.
• Strong Linux proficiency at a software engineer (user) level; comfortable reading and reviewing production code in a modern high-level programming language (Python, Go, etc.), and debugging live systems on the box.
• Track record of shipping and operating a distributed backend service under real production load - you have carried a pager and run incidents.
• Experience mastering a complex technical domain quickly and making credible architectural decisions in it.
• Practical fluency with observability and data tooling to judge quality yourself, not via reports (Grafana, Kibana/Elasticsearch, Redash or equivalents).
• Demonstrated people leadership: 1:1s, performance conversations, hiring, and growing engineers.
• Experience working in an agentic / AI-assisted development workflow.
• Understanding of ML-driven systems, including model quality evaluation, training, and production operations.
• Professional proficiency in English, written and spoken.
• Availability to work EU hours.

Nice to have:

• Working knowledge of email infrastructure: SMTP, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, rDNS, IP reputation and warm-up, RBLs, feedback loops.
• Experience with open-source mail stacks - Rspamd, SpamAssassin, Postfix, Exim, Halon - or the web hosting ecosystem (cPanel/WHM and other control panels).
• Exposure to the ML model lifecycle: training data quality, evaluation metrics, and the trade-offs in tuning detection systems.
• Experience running incident and escalation management with external partners.

Benefits

What's in it for you

• A focus on professional development
• Interesting and challenging projects
• Fully remote work with flexible working hours - schedule your day and work from any location worldwide
• Paid 24 days of vacation per year, 10 days of national holidays, and unlimited sick leave
• Compensation for private medical insurance
• Co-working and gym/sports reimbursement
• Budget for education
• The opportunity to receive a reward for the most innovative idea that the company can patent

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