Lead Product Manager (Cloud Dev Tooling)

Job Description

We are a young, fast-growing startup building cutting-edge technology to revolutionize cloud development processes and support highly efficient dev&test feedback loops. At its core, LocalStack provides a high-fidelity emulator and local cloud development platform - imagine developing cloud applications and data pipelines entirely on your local machine within a lightweight cloud sandbox, running in Docker. Our mission is to empower developers to rapidly build and test their cloud applications, allowing for a more enjoyable dev experience, and saving valuable time and resources.

LocalStack has a large and active open source community (51k+ stars on GitHub) with several 100k active users worldwide and 200M+ downloads to date. With a growing international customer base across Fortune Global 500 companies for our advanced enterprise offerings, as well as a growing, globally distributed team of top-notch engineers and GTM experts, we are on an exciting growth journey to become the world’s leading platform for local cloud software development.

LocalStack is headquartered in Zurich/Switzerland, with a development office in Vienna/Austria and remote team members from around the world (incl. US, FR, UK, IN, IT, MX, IE).

Requirements

We are looking for a Lead Product Manager / DevX Engineer who can build on the incredibly strong foundation we’ve established with LocalStack, and push our developer platform to the next level. Hundreds of thousands of developers out there are already using LocalStack on a daily basis, and we have the unique opportunity to truly shape the space and redefine how cloud apps are being developed across the industry.One of the key defining principles is that we want to meet developers where they are, hence finding novel ways to integrate our solutions into the existing developer ecosystem is crucial. We have already built various integrations with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, CDK, or Pulumi, and our customers are using the LocalStack core emulator across various different CI platforms, on their local machine (in Docker), or in hosted Kubernetes environments. An essential part of this role will be to establish a broad and deep understanding of the cloud dev tooling ecosystem, continuously analyze where the market and the competition is at, and identify opportunities for how we can further evolve the product offering to solve customer use cases and provide the best dev experience (DevX) out there.

The broader value proposition of LocalStack as a platform is to provide value across three main dimensions: (1) individual developer productivity, (2) team collaboration and insights, as well as (3) advanced enterprise use cases. As our GTM team is collecting signals from our growing customer base, it is becoming increasingly critical to align the product offering with customer expectations, and to provide strong feature-based differentiators and upsell opportunities across our product tiers.

This Lead Product Manager role is a unique position that is both strategic and hands-on. You will play an instrumental role in our journey to becoming the world’s leading platform for local cloud development - acting as a nexus between our Engineering, Data, DevRel, and GTM teams, and working actively with our large community to gain insights and steer the direction of the product. Given the highly technical nature of our product, we are looking for someone with a strong track record in a technical/engineering role - in fact, the ideal candidate is someone who has both product management experience and is still working hands-on with cloud technologies on a daily/regular basis.

As a company, we’re in an exciting transition as we enter our next growth phase - so far our platform and tooling has been mostly focused on AWS cloud services, but we have ambitious plans this year to go beyond AWS and venture into new communities (e.g., data platforms like Snowflake), and other cloud providers/hyperscalers that our users have been eagerly requesting for a long time.

The way we approach product management at LocalStack is to foster strong bottom-up innovation and ownership. A key criterion for becoming successful as a Lead PM at LocalStack is to be able to work both independently and collaboratively, and to be embedded into the team rather than following top-down delegation. It will be critical to focus on data-driven insights and research, to point out gaps and opportunities, and help create focus for the team. Another key ingredient for success is to connect the dots by leveraging our strong foundation of existing features, and achieve even more user value by offering integrations, gluing things together, and providing a smooth end-to-end developer experience.

If you have a strong background in product management, and if you live and breathe cloud development, software testing & debugging, IaC & automation, DevOps & CI pipelines, and developer experience/productivity as a whole - we’d love to get to know you!

Key Responsibilities

• Co-own and drive the technical direction and roadmap of the LocalStack emulators and cloud platform
• Help define a comprehensive picture of the existing landscape of cloud dev tooling, establish a strong understanding of how LocalStack fits into the picture, and derive a concise plan for what we should and should not focus on building
• Conduct market and competitive analysis by monitoring market trends, competitors, and customer feedback to identify new opportunities, anticipate market changes, and make informed product decisions
• Perform technical spikes, develop simple technical PoC’s and mockups to illustrate and showcase new functionalities, novel features in the LocalStack platform, and integrations with third-party platforms and frameworks
• Proactively work with the Engineering teams (core emulators & SaaS platform) to align on product roadmap, prioritization, and timelines
• Work closely with our Data team to collect metrics and derive insights related to product telemetry, adoption, and usage patterns
• Incorporate feedback mechanisms into various parts of the product, to systematically collect user sentiment, identify potential gaps and opportunities, and establish a culture of continuous improvement
• Collaborate with our DevRel team on highlighting the key value propositions, shaping the product story for different user personas, and fleshing out prototypical use cases that we should focus on in our marketing and messaging
• Define and document a mid- and long-term vision for the product, in close alignment with key stakeholders across the organization, and based on data-driven insights
• Support us in fostering a strong culture of innovation, enabling the team to develop and evaluate new product features with our customer base, and reconciling the high-level product vision with bottom-up innovation happening across the team
• Help define processes and success metrics for coordinated product launches, provide guidance on consistent nomenclature for different stages/maturities of product features (e.g., preview/beta/GA), define and track success criteria and milestones for customer beta programs
• Work with company leadership to identity new market opportunities, derive strategic roadmaps for the product, and support in budgeting exercises and ROI calculations

Qualifications and Skills

• 3+ years of experience in product management, preferably working on software developer tooling or cloud platforms
• Deep understanding of software product lifecycle, development processes, and the challenges of bringing new products to the market
• Strong experience with major cloud computing platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure), IaC frameworks (e.g., Terraform, CDK), serverless application development frameworks, and other tooling in the cloud developer space
• Strong prior engineering experience, preferably having worked as a Senior/Lead engineer at a dev tools product company in the past
• Problem-solving and analytical skills - ability to analyze complex situations, identify and evaluate potential challenges, determine practical solutions, and systematically document all decisions and outcomes
• Experience working collaboratively with cross-functional team members, ability to drive decision making and facilitate communication across different departments
• Empathy and user-centric mindset - it is essential that you understand the use cases, pain points, and requirements of our users and customers, to create products that provide value and deliver a great developer experience.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and performance-based bonuses.
• Opportunities for professional development and training.
• Dynamic and collaborative work environment.
• Flexible work arrangements.