A
Senior Director, Product Management
Contract type
Ongoing
Work mode
Remote · Europe, EU
Experience
Lead / principal · 15+ years
Job description
Senior Director, Product Management leads the product team for Azul Prime, the company's high-performance JVM, and is accountable for Prime's growth. It is a player-coach role managing product managers while owning strategy, pricing, and key customer conversations.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time · Employee (employment agreement)
- Work mode
- Remote · Europe, EU
- Languages
- English – fluent
What you'll do
- Own whether Prime succeeds or fails in the market: new business, pipeline, pilot-to-production conversion, expansion, renewal, and retention on Prime.
- Define what success looks like, instrument it, report it honestly when it is bad, and change the product or the plan when the data says the strategy is wrong.
- Set the multi-year direction for Prime: which segments and workloads it wins, what to build versus partner for, and how it fits with Optimizer Hub, Azul Core, Intelligence Cloud, and Payara.
- Report to the CPO and work directly with the CEO, CRO, and CTO; bring strategy, roadmap, and pricing decisions to the leadership team and argue for them with data.
- Build and run the Prime go-to-market motion with sales, marketing, and customer success: who the buyer is, which accounts to target, what the pitch is, how pilots are structured, and what makes them convert.
- Work with the Prime sales specialists and field leadership on target accounts, qualification, and deal strategy.
- Join strategic customer and prospect calls and keep a clear, evidence-based view of why Prime deals are won, lost, and stalled.
- Translate strategy into a sequenced, credible roadmap, make trade-offs explicit, and build alignment across engineering, sales, and marketing.
- Own how Prime is priced, packaged, and metered, including how Optimizer Hub is packaged as part of it; build the models, pressure-test them with the field, and work with finance and sales to get them approved and into market.
- Manage, develop, and hire the product managers on Prime; give each PM a clear area to own and hold them to outcomes.
- Set the standard for how the team works: written strategy and decisions, customer evidence behind every roadmap call, and AI tools used in daily product work.
- Make sure the team works with engineering beyond writing requirements: in the sprints, in design reviews, and in the implementation trade-offs.
- Own customer requirement sessions, customer-facing technical documentation, and the operator experience of installing, sizing, and running Optimizer Hub on Kubernetes.
- Partner with marketing on positioning, launches, sales enablement, and public-facing content; run competitive and market research.
- Hold your own with engineering teams on JVM architecture and principles of operation, JIT compilation, garbage collection, and warm-up.
What we're looking for
- 15+ years in engineering and/or product roles, with a strong track record of launching and scaling products to revenue.
- 10+ years in product management, including owning a product or product line end to end: strategy through launch through revenue.
- 5+ years managing teams, including hiring, developing, and managing product managers.
- Track record shipping enterprise infrastructure or developer software sold to platform and engineering teams, such as language runtimes, application performance, observability, or cloud cost optimization.
- Ability to develop a deep working knowledge of JVM architecture and operation: JIT compilation, garbage collection, and warm-up.
- Demonstrated ownership of pricing and packaging for a technical product, including the cross-functional work of getting a model approved and into market.
- Experience building a go-to-market motion with sales: working enterprise deals, and understanding DevOps engineers, platform engineers, and developers as the key influencers in a sales cycle.
- Experience conducting market and competitor research with focus on product impacts and positioning.
- Experience directly interacting with customers and prospects - building customer relationships, discussing roadmap and strategy and conducting customer interviews.
- Strong domain knowledge of public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) and Kubernetes.
- Fluency with AI tools and experience operating in an AI-first product management organization.
- Excellent written and verbal communication in English, equally effective with an engineer and with a Fortune 100 CIO.
- Comfortable in a fully remote, async, multi-time-zone setup; self-directed and a strong writer.
- Comfortable in a startup-shaped environment where bringing order to chaos is part of the job.
- Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent work experience.
Nice to have
- Hands-on software or quality engineering background: you have written code and debugged production systems.
- Experience with open source communities and licensing.
- Experience taking a product from early traction to a durable revenue line.
- Experience leading across more than one product at once, especially products at different stages or sold through different motions.
- Experience with infrastructure software that customers deploy and operate themselves, not just SaaS.
- Working knowledge of Java and Java development tooling.
- An advanced degree and/or relevant certifications.
Your team
Prime product team
The product team for Azul Prime, Azul's high-performance JVM, which includes Optimizer Hub.
Apply
Direct apply at Azul
Opens the job posting at Azul
About Azul
Key facts
- Prime is Azul's high-performance JVM; Optimizer Hub moves JIT compilation and warm-up off the JVMs into a shared service running in the customer's Kubernetes environment.
- Other products mentioned: Azul Core, Intelligence Cloud, and Payara.
- Employment is contingent upon the completion of reference and background checks.
What they value
- Maniacal Customer Focus
- Innovation & Excellence
- Initiative & Courage
- Impact & Influence
- Integrity & Transparency
- Diversity, Inclusion & Teamwork