Confluent - Product Manager, Cloud Networking

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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

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 — Private Link, 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.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• 8+ years of product management experience, with at least 3 years owning a cloud infrastructure, platform, or networking product.
• Demonstrated track…