Staff Product Manager, Flink Cloud Platform

Confluent is a company focused on transforming how data moves and is utilized. They are seeking a Staff Product Manager to lead the Flink Cloud Platform, responsible for driving product strategy, managing enterprise customer adoption, and collaborating across teams to ensure seamless integration with Confluent Cloud's capabilities.

Responsibilities:

• Own the Flink Cloud Platform roadmap: Define and drive the product strategy and roadmap for enterprise-grade Flink capabilities including data-at-rest encryption (BYOK), client-side field-level encryption, managed disaster recovery, access controls, and audit logging notably
• Drive enterprise customer adoption: Partner closely with field teams and strategic customers (including top-tier financial services and regulated industries) to understand requirements, close product gaps, and accelerate enterprise Flink adoption
• Write product specifications: Author clear, precise PRD documents that translate complex customer and business requirements into well-scoped engineering deliverables
• Collaborate cross-functionally: Work across security, identity, networking, and storage teams to ensure Flink integrates seamlessly with Confluent Cloud's enterprise capabilities
• Influence product strategy: Contribute to the overall Confluent Cloud Flink and DSP product strategy, identifying external market trends, competitive dynamics, and new opportunities
• Measure success: Define and track key metrics for enterprise Flink adoption, working with data and analytics to inform prioritization decisions
• Educate and enable: Partner with PMM, docs, and field enablement to ensure Confluent's sales and customer success teams can effectively position and support Flink enterprise capabilities

Requirements:

• 8+ years of product management experience, with significant experience in cloud infrastructure, data platforms, or distributed systems
• Deep understanding of enterprise security and compliance requirements, including encryption, key management (BYOK/CMK)
• Experience with stream processing or real-time data systems — familiarity with Apache Flink, Apache Kafka, or similar technologies is strongly preferred
• Strong technical acumen, ability to engage deeply with engineering on system design, understand distributed systems trade-offs, and write precise technical specifications
• Track record of shipping enterprise-grade cloud products in partnership with engineering teams, ideally in a fully managed / SaaS environment
• Excellent cross-functional collaboration skills, demonstrated ability to align and drive outcomes across multiple engineering teams, security, field, and go-to-market functions
• Customer empathy and field engagement experience, comfortable engaging directly with enterprise customers, understanding their technical and business needs, and translating feedback into product direction
• Strong written and verbal communication — ability to author compelling strategy documents, PRDs, and presentations for technical and non-technical audiences
• Data-driven decision making, uses quantitative metrics and analytics to prioritize, measure success, and build consensus
• Experience with cloud service providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their security/encryption ecosystems
• Familiarity with Apache Flink internals (state management, checkpointing, SQL, etc.)
• Experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, government)
• Background in open-source communities or developer platforms
• Experience with pricing and packaging for cloud-native products