About Role:

We are looking for a Principal Product Manager to lead the Hybrid Control Plane strategy. This is a critical role at the intersection of cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped enterprise environments. You will define how Confluent enables customers to operate Kafka clusters across diverse footprints—public cloud, private cloud, and edge—while maintaining unified control, security, and observability.

You’ll contribute to the mission of making the world’s best event streaming platform run everywhere. The Distributed Cloud team is responsible for the product experience of operating a streaming platform in customer’s own environments and across the private and public cloud.

You’ll be responsible for the success of a broad product strategy, from initial conception and customer development to growth strategy. You’ll become the trusted resource for your product, making sure that the engineering, design, sales, and marketing have what they need to make the right tradeoffs, build the right product, and grow it successfully in the market. You’ll become the face of the product to customers and the market

What You Will Do:

• Define and execute the product vision for Confluent’s hybrid control plane, enabling centralized management of distributed Kafka infrastructure.

• Partner with engineering to build scalable, multi-tenant services that manage clusters running in Confluent Cloud, customer VPCs (BYOK/BYOC), and self-managed environments.

• Collaborate with platform PMs, infra architects, and security stakeholders to build control-plane components including provisioning, policy enforcement, metering, and observability.

• Set the strategy: Identify opportunities for Confluent to better serve operators across infrastructures by executing tried-and-true playbooks and inventing entirely new approaches.

• Understand our users: Conduct interviews and analyze data to define personas, user journeys, and key jobs to be done.

• Work across constituencies: Create shared understanding and direction across engineering, product, business development, support, sales, and marketing teams within Confluent and externally with our partners.

• Be responsible for the whole lifecycle: Drive multi-company, cross-functional initiatives from conception through initial delivery and ongoing iteration after launch.

• Close the loop: Define quantitative and qualitative targets, measure performance against them, share results with stakeholders, and incorporate those learnings into the next development cycle.

• Manage complexity: Deliver value while handling the surprises and challenges of a quickly evolving product, ambitious partnership targets, and a rapidly growing organization

What You Will Bring:

• Experience with Enterprise software deployment, monitoring and security architectures

• Proven track record owning 0→1 or complex technical products at scale.

• Deep understanding of Kubernetes, distributed systems, and cloud-native control planes (preferred: AWS, GCP, Azure).

• Experience building and supporting enterprise-grade products as an engineer, product manager, or solutions architect.

• Experience building, writing, maintaining and defending a clear product roadmap and backlog backed by user stories and customer research.

• 12+ years of product management experience, with at least 3+ in platform/infrastructure domains.

• Exceptional written and presentation skills. At Confluent we rely heavily on documents to explain the vision and facilitate concrete communication.

• Ability to build relationships with co-workers and customers located around the world.

• Demonstrated ability to drive business outcomes through product changes