Product Manager, Research

Job Description

About Us

At Cloudflare, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal: to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers trillions of requests per month. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer and named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list.

We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team. We hire the best people based on an evaluation of their potential and support them throughout their time at Cloudflare. Come join us!

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 Role

You’ll be focused on working with our Research team to advance internet technology for Cloudflare and the internet as a whole. This team works on foundational internet technologies: from advancing TLS, to experimenting with the distributed web, and to whatever the next important leap may be. Then we share this critical work to the internet through working groups and RFCs and drive innovation to internal Cloudflare engineering teams through new solutions and technologies. This role is ideal for candidates who are passionate about building the future of the internet.

Examples of the problems you’ll work on:

1. Help contribute to the next versions of TLS and build frameworks for experimentation on the Cloudflare’s global network.
2. Work with external browsers and applications on new standards to advance speed and privacy for the internet as a whole.
3. Dive into new distributed web technologies to build new products and features on Cloudflare’s edge while developing relationships with key industry contacts.
4. Evangelize the Research team within Cloudflare and transition developed concepts into traditional R&D product teams.

Responsibilities

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

• Own the product vision for your area. Ensure that it aligns with the overall product and company vision.
• Be an expert on the domain, the market, the trends. 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.

Key Competencies:

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.

• BS/MS in a technology- or business-related field or equivalent practical experience directly building web technologies.
• 5+ years of product management or equivalent experience with demonstrated ability to discover opportunities, and then define and deliver products.
• 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.
• Strong technical abilities. You are intimately familiar with modern software development practices used to build and deploy networks, infrastructure, and applications. You've preferably been working full time on a software delivery team.
• 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 theoretical and practical knowledge of how the Internet works at layers 2 through 7.
• Experience working with data analysis at scale. An understanding of how to make big data small.

Bonus Points

• Experience in building, configuring, or operating web crypto systems (crypto means cryptography). A strong understanding of PKI and TLS.
• Experience in distributed web technologies (IPFS and Ethereum specifically)
• Ability to validate early ideas through quantitative and qualitative methods (A/B and multivariate testing, user testing, etc).
• Scripting/programming experience (Python, Go, etc.).
• A solid understanding of RESTful API design & documentation.
• Capacity planning, cost modeling, and operations research experience.

We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.

Project Galileo : We equip politically and artistically important organizations and journalists with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.

Project Athenian : We created Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration.

Path Forward Partnership : Since 2016, we have partnered with Path Forward, a nonprofit organization, to create 16-week positions for mid-career professionals who want to get back to the workplace after taking time off to care for a child, parent, or loved one.

1.1.1.1 : We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy policy and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.

Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!

Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.

Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at [email protected] or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.