Confluent - Staff Product Manager, Cloud Networking

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. Confluent's Cloud Networking team is responsible for making connectivity to and from Confluent Cloud reliable, scalable, secure, cost-efficient, and simple to use - across Kafka, Flink, Connectors, Data Governance, and Tableflow, on AWS, Azure, and GCP. As Staff PM for Cloud Networking, you will own the platform strategy for how enterprises connect to Confluent Cloud. This is not a feature-level role - you will define the architecture of our networking product surface across all clouds and connection models, set the multi-year roadmap, and operate as a co-decision-maker alongside engineering leadership on the technical direction of the platform. You will work across all networking connection types - PrivateLink, VNet peering, Transit Gateway, Private Service Connect, and egress optimization - and drive alignment across engineering, field, and executive stakeholders on what we build and why. What You Will Do:

• Own the platform strategy for Confluent Cloud Networking across AWS, Azure, and GCP, defining the north star, multi-year roadmap, and sequencing of bets that balance customer connectivity needs, cost efficiency, security posture, and engineering leverage.
• Define frameworks and standards that other PMs, designers, and engineers use to evaluate networking decisions, including connection model selection criteria, cost attribution models, security control frameworks, and launch readiness standards.
• Drive architectural decisions in partnership with engineering leadership, weighing trade-offs between user experience, cost, and operational complexity.
• Expand scope and create optionality by identifying adjacent areas the team should move into, such as network observability, cost transparency tooling, and next-generation isolation models, and building the business case for investment.
• Develop the product team by mentoring Senior PMs, providing feedback on product documents and roadmap thinking, and raising the bar on customer research and decision-making.
• Build senior stakeholder alignment across product, engineering, sales, field, legal, and security organizations, then present the platform vision to executive leadership to secure organizational investment. Develop compelling business cases, clearly communicate trade-offs, and earn commitment for multi-year platform bets.
• Define and own success metrics at the platform level, connecting technical milestones to business outcomes including revenue, retention, attach rates, and infrastructure cost efficiency.
• Engage directly with strategic customers and prospects, representing the product roadmap with credibility in technical conversations with enterprise CTOs, architects, and network engineers.
• 8+ years of product management experience, with at least 3 years owning a cloud infrastructure, platform, or networking product.
• Demonstrated track record of setting product strategy and roadmap at a platform or portfolio level, not just feature-level delivery.
• Deep fluency in cloud networking concepts, including PrivateLink, VNet peering, Transit Gateway, Private Service Connect, DNS, security groups, CIDR/IP management, and the trade-offs across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Experience owning products that serve enterprise customers with complex compliance, security, and connectivity requirements.
• Proven ability to partner with engineering leadership as a co-decision-maker on architectural direction, rather than simply translating engineering output.
• Strong analytical foundation with the ability to model unit economics, build business cases with cost and risk sensitivity, and measure platform health through leading and lagging indicators.
• Practices AI-native product management by using AI tools as a true thought partner throughout the product lifecycle, including research, prioritization, specification writing, and analytics. Demonstrates sound judgment on when to use, override, and validate AI-generated outputs, while also designing products, features, and APIs that are composable, observable, and easy for AI agents and automation to consume.
• Experience developing Product Managers and raising the bar on product thinking through direct mentorship, feedback, and team processes.
• Experience with Envoy, Service Mesh, DNS, and Kubernetes networking.
• Familiarity with Terraform, API-first development, infrastructure-as-code workflows, and the networking automation practices used by enterprise engineering teams.
• Exposure to network traffic metering, data transfer billing attribution, cost transparency tooling, or pricing and packaging strategy for cloud infrastructure products, including defining packaging tiers, price points, and commercial models for enterprise buyers.
• Experience operating in a product-led growth (PLG) or usage-based pricing environment.
• MBA degree is a plus. United States Product Management Remote Professional Multiple Cities (0147) International Business Machines Corporation