Principal Product Manager

About Your Role

A once-in-a-decade shift is reshaping enterprise infrastructure. Nearly every enterprise is moving toward a single, self-hosted platform that can run both containers and virtual machines — to raise hardware utilization, cut costs, and simplify operations. Steep price hikes from legacy virtualization vendors are accelerating the shift, pushing organizations to migrate their VM estates onto Kubernetes at speed — each move carrying unique and complex networking requirements.

At the same time, enterprises are taking AI applications and AI agents from pilot to production, and increasingly hosting their own open LLMs to control token costs and keep models close to the proprietary data that lives in their data centers. It all converges on one requirement: a single platform that can host containers and VMs together — spanning data centers and regions, with enterprise-grade HA and DR, high performance, low latency, and massive scale.

The networking that makes these converged platforms work is extraordinarily complex and almost always on the critical path. Tigera has built the best-in-class networking solution for this new generation of converged platforms — and this role sits at the center of that opportunity.

We are hiring a Principal Product Manager to help drive the strategy and evolution of the Calico platform. This is a senior, high-ownership role spanning strategy through execution: you will define product vision, shape go-to-market, and partner directly with engineering, sales, marketing, and ecosystem partners to bring new capabilities to market. You will own strategic initiatives across the platform over time — the first being to extend Calico's converged networking for VM workloads in Kubernetes, from initial MVP through GA and the roadmap beyond — while taking on additional platform bets as the business grows.

For this position, we are looking to hire in the San Francisco Bay Area (US), hybrid at our San Francisco or San Jose office. 

San Francisco Bay Area Salary Range: $220,000 - $240,000 OTE

You Will Own:

• Product vision & roadmap for major Calico platform initiatives — from MVP to GA and the phased roadmap that follows, sequenced by customer value and revenue impact.
• Competitive positioning in the Kubernetes networking and security market. You will craft differentiated narratives that lead with platform value — unified networking, best-in-class microsegmentation and DNS policy, cluster-mesh, observability — rather than competing feature-for-feature at the dataplane layer.
• Go-to-market strategy across both sales-led motions (sales enablement, crisp platform pitches, close partnership with sales on qualified opportunities) and partner-led motions with the ecosystem of platform and infrastructure partners.
• Customer discovery & validation with enterprise accounts — running structured interviews to pressure-test and validate assumptions before committing engineering resources.
• Cross-functional execution with engineering on scope and delivery, and with marketing on messaging discipline and campaigns that shape market perception.
• Messaging & positioning discipline — building canonical positioning artifacts and driving consistency in how the product is described across the organization, to customers, and in to the market
• Ownership of the first five deals - Roll up your sleeves and own the process of closing the first five deals. Abstract learnings, share learnings broadly with the extended team, tune the strategy, build a repeatable playbook and enable the sales and solutions engineering teams to scale the business.

You Have:

• 8+ years in product management, including senior/principal-level ownership of technical infrastructure products, with a track record of taking products from vision to GA and revenue.
• Deep Kubernetes and cloud-native networking/security expertise — CNI, network policy, microsegmentation, L2/L3 networking concepts, eBPF, and the broader cloud-native ecosystem.
• Sharp competitive and positioning instincts — able to build canonical positioning artifacts (single-line description, problem/audience, category framing, differentiators, explicit "what it is not" boundaries) and enforce messaging consistency across the org.
• Enterprise GTM range — comfortable enabling sales, engaging senior technical buyers at large enterprises, and driving partner co-selling.
• Discovery-driven and evidence-based — you pressure-test assumptions with customer interviews and prioritize by revenue impact rather than work type.
• Crisp communicator and operator — structured, low-friction, and factually disciplined; you move quickly from insight to a decision-ready artifact.

Why This Role Matters:

Calico sits at the center of how modern enterprises connect and secure their infrastructure for cloud native applications and AI Agents. As a Principal Product Manager, you will own strategic bets that shape the platform's direction and reframe how the market thinks about Calico — working directly with company leadership on some of Tigera's most consequential decisions.