Product Manager - Cache

About the Department

As a Product Manager at Cloudflare, you are responsible for building products that improve the way that the Internet works. Product Managers at Cloudflare sit at the intersection of software development, design, and business strategy. We shape high-level product goals but also get our hands dirty. On an average day, you might pitch a concept to senior leadership, create a launch plan with marketing, work with designers to conduct user research, prototype a new feature, iterate on a spec, analyze usage data, and pair with an engineer on implementation. We have ultimate responsibility for understanding our client needs, influencing business strategy, feature specification, and working with engineering to develop our software.

About The Team

The Content Delivery group aims to help make the Internet faster, safer and more secure through building and optimizing one of the world’s largest CDNs in addition to driving adoption of new standards.  This involves feature implementation, optimization, debugging, working with responsible teams and engineers, documentation and tooling to enable others.

What You’ll Do

This is a pivotal role at Cloudflare. As such, the successful candidate will need excellent communication, planning and documentation skills, along with a very strong grasp of software architecture and layer 7 technologies, and also excellent business acumen. 

As the Cache Product Manager you will be responsible for one of the most critical parts of Cloudflare, from both a business and technological perspective, our Content Delivery Network (CDN). We have infrastructure in 300 cities globally, serving traffic for some of the world's biggest and most well-known brands. At the heart of it all is our CDN, where we process an average of 44M requests per second and store files and assets retrieved from customer origins to ensure faster delivery time to end users whilst reducing egress traffic. 

Successful candidates will be responsible for driving the continuous improvement of the CDN through innovative and new products and features, working with engineering to serve customer traffic faster than before. A strong technical understanding and confidence discussing low-level ideas with our engineering organization is a must.

You will also have a strong business acumen. CDN is one of our biggest revenue generators, and you need to be comfortable in financial situations such as in competitive situations, where you will work closely with our sales team to drive deals to a win. 

This is a tremendous opportunity to make a big difference in a rapidly growing company. 

As a member of the growing team of product managers your responsibilities will include:

• Own the product vision for your area. Ensure that it aligns with the overall product and company vision.
• Evangelize the vision constantly so all stakeholders are aligned, have context and understand where we are going.
• Represent the customer. Be the champion and voice of customers. Build intimate, personal customer relationships. Bring the customer's voice into the creation process.
• Manage the roadmap. Make tough tactical prioritization decisions while helping the company think long-term. Build trust with stakeholders by maintaining an understandable, accurate roadmap.
• Author use cases and prioritize requirements. Translate market observations and customer feedback into a prioritized product backlog.  Author use cases based on specific real-world product applications and extrapolate detailed product requirements for the scenarios.
• Collaborate across teams. We win or lose as a team. Product managers play a critical role in creating alignment between engineering teams and stakeholders. A collaborative attitude is essential to the job.
• Measure success. Own the measures used to define success for your product. Success measures must be defined at the inception of a product and tracked throughout its lifecycle. Make measures visible to all stakeholders and interpret them into actionable conclusions and new hypotheses.
• Develop new opportunities. With your finger on the pulse of the market, the customers and the engineering teams, you are uniquely positioned to discover and develop new opportunities. 

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience

The ideal candidate is entrepreneurial-minded and thrives in a fast-paced and goal-driven environment. You have outstanding communication and collaboration skills and are able to work with a diverse group, get consensus, and drive the product forward. You are execution focused and emphasize getting things done while paying attention to important details. You have several years of experience working with enterprise, SaaS, or security technologies. You have a passion for building SaaS products and want to solve the problems of performance, security, and reliability of the Internet.   

• Minimum 5 years of product management or equivalent experience with demonstrated ability to discover opportunities, and then define and deliver products
• Experience presenting new products and features to customers. You are enthusiastic about taking something you have helped build and sharing it with the world
• Experience driving revenue, with a demonstrable track record of business impact 
• Strong customer and stakeholder empathy. You must be not only the voice of the customer, but at various times the voice of marketing, finance, engineering, support and ops. You must be able to channel many points of view
• Deep knowledge of web servers (we are currently using NGINX) and web protocols.
• Domain expertise (e.g. as a practitioner or technology provider) in several of: HTTP content delivery, network performance, application performance, browser technologies and Internet security
• Exceptional communication, presentation, organizational and analytical skills
• Demonstrated ability to lead, drive consensus and deliver in a matrix organization with multiple stakeholders
• Must be able to define and manage complex process and/or product issues of a broad scope using independent judgment
• Experience balancing execution, agility, and culture at a fast growing business.
• Very strong technical abilities. You are intimately familiar with modern software development practices used to build and deploy applications. You preferably run your own websites and are comfortable working at the terminal level to test products.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to all audiences

Bonus Points

• BS/MS in a technology- or business-related field
• Deep knowledge of Content Delivery Networks and caching strategies. 
• Deep knowledge of web security issues and industry standards
• Knowledge of working with distributed systems
• Experience in building, configuring or using cloud based networking products
• A solid understanding of RESTful API design & documentation
• Hands-on experience with command-line tools used for interacting with APIs, debugging and testing (e.g. curl, dig, etc.)
• Scripting/programming experience (Python, Go, etc.) and/or experience with web frameworks

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

• For Colorado-based hires: Estimated annual salary of $170,000 - $208,000
• For New York City, Washington, and California (excluding Bay Area) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $192,000 - $234,000
• For Bay Area-based hires: Estimated annual salary of $202,000 - $246,000

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

Benefits

Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family.  Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun!  The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.

Health & Welfare Benefits

• Medical/Rx Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Commuter Spending Accounts
• Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
• On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
• Global Travel Medical Insurance

Financial Benefits

• Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Life & Accident Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
• Employee Stock Participation Plan

Time Off

• Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
• Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave