The OpportunityThe Director of Product, Platform owns everything that has no graphical user interface. That includes our public APIs, our CHAOS SDK, and the broader platform infrastructure that third-party developers and enterprise customers build on top of. There are no direct reports in this role. Instead, you are a high-leverage individual contributor who shapes strategy, drives decisions, and creates clarity in a part of the product that is deeply technical and increasingly central to Cerby's enterprise value proposition.
This role is for someone who has been an engineer or engineering manager on platform-centric products and now wants to apply that technical fluency to strategic product work. You will report directly to the CEO and collaborate closely with our CTO and our Chief Architect.
What You Will OwnPlatform Strategy and Prioritization- Own Cerby's platform product strategy: the API surface, the CHAOS SDK, integration architecture, and the broader story we tell to enterprise buyers and developer audiences.
- Drive prioritization decisions that reflect both near-term customer needs and long-term platform leverage. In a world where we can build faster than ever, making the right sequencing decisions is the highest-value contribution you can make.
- Identify and articulate the platform capabilities that create compounding value for Cerby, whether in stickiness, integrations, developer adoption, or enterprise land-and-expand motions.
Technical Customer and Prospect Engagement- Spend structured, recurring time with technical buyers, security engineers, and integration owners at customer and prospect accounts.
- Build relationships with the people who evaluate and implement Cerby at a technical level, not just the economic buyers.
- Bring back from those conversations a clear sense of what is blocking adoption, what is generating love, and where Cerby's platform story needs to strengthen.
- Partner with Sales and Marketing to ensure the platform narrative lands credibly with technical audiences in the field.
Working With Engineering- Partner closely with engineering on platform architecture decisions, bringing a product lens to technical tradeoffs around extensibility, backward compatibility, developer ergonomics, and scalability.
- Because engineers are increasingly taking on lower-level product decisions, your role is to set the strategic frame clearly enough that those decisions are well-directed, not just well-executed.
- Be the person who bridges technical depth and commercial clarity: able to go deep on an API design decision in the morning and explain the platform story to a sales team in the afternoon.
Platform Launches and Enablement- Own how Cerby launches platform capabilities, including API updates, SDK releases, and changes to integration infrastructure.
- Raise the standard for technical launch quality: documentation, migration guidance, developer communication, and internal enablement for Sales and Solutions Engineering.
- Cerby needs to get significantly better at product launches, and the platform surface is no exception. You will build the rigor that makes platform launches predictable and impactful.
Product Data and Feedback Loops- Define and track the metrics that matter for platform health: API adoption, SDK usage, error rates, integration depth, and developer retention.
- Build feedback loops between platform usage data, developer conversations, and roadmap decisions. This is a discipline Cerby is building, and you will help establish it on the platform side.
- Use data to identify where the platform is generating leverage and where it is generating friction, and act on both.
What We Are Looking ForBackground and Experience- You have been a software engineer or engineering manager, ideally on a platform, API, or developer-tooling product. This is not a nice-to-have; it is how you will earn credibility and make better decisions in this role.
- 10 or more years of combined engineering and product experience, with at least a few of those years spent explicitly on platform or infrastructure-oriented products in a product capacity.
- You have owned or led a developer-facing SDK or API that developers actually adopted and liked using. This means your developer platform not only existed, but had documentation, ergonomics, and ease of getting started that made developers want to build on it. You understand that the difference between an SDK and a good SDK is mostly in that experience.
- Experience at a B2B SaaS company, ideally in security, identity, or a domain where enterprise integration complexity is real.
- Familiarity with the mechanics of enterprise expansion: how platform capabilities drive land-and-expand motions, what technical buyers evaluate, and how integration depth translates to retention.
How You Think and Work- You can switch registers. You are as comfortable in a deep technical architecture discussion as you are presenting a platform strategy narrative to a non-technical executive.
- You think in systems. You naturally see how a small API design decision compounds over time into developer experience or technical debt.
- You are comfortable being a lone voice of product conviction in a highly technical environment. You advocate for the customer and the developer even when the default is to optimize for internal convenience.
- You move fast. You make decisions with incomplete information, explain your reasoning, and update when you learn something new.
- You do not require an audience to do great work. You are a high-leverage IC who measures your impact by outcomes, not visibility.
What Success Looks Like- Technical customer coverage: You have a regular cadence of conversations with technical buyers, integration engineers, and security architects at customer and prospect accounts. You are trusted and recognized in those conversations.
- Platform prioritization clarity: Engineering teams have a clear, well-reasoned platform roadmap, and the time from a validated technical insight to a prioritized backlog item is measurably shorter.
- Launch quality for platform releases: API and SDK releases ship with complete documentation, internal enablement materials, and adoption tracking from day one.
- Platform health metrics: You can point to a clear set of metrics for API adoption, SDK usage, and integration depth, and show how they are trending and why.
- Sales and Solutions Engineering confidence: Cerby's field teams can speak accurately and credibly about the platform story because you made sure they understood it.
- Compounding platform value: Over a 12-month horizon, you can point to at least two or three platform decisions you drove that are generating measurable leverage in expansion revenue, partner integrations, or developer adoption.
Desired Qualities- Technical Fluency: You have done the engineering work yourself, and your credibility in this role rests on that foundation. You do not need a technical translator.
- Strategic Product Thinker: You see beyond the ticket and into the market. You form platform opinions grounded in both technical depth and commercial logic.
- Developer Empathy: You understand what it feels like to be a developer trying to build on top of someone else's platform, and you use that understanding to make better decisions.
- Launch Discipline: You believe that a great platform capability that is poorly launched is still a missed opportunity. You bring the same rigor to releasing as to building.
- High-Leverage IC: You are energized by the idea of making a disproportionate impact without a team under you. You have done it before and you prefer it.
- AI Believer: You are excited about the mission to automate away the human element in identity, and you see the platform layer as the foundation that makes that mission technically possible at scale.
