Tigera

Principal Product Manager- Calico Platform

Tigera • $220K — $240K *
Enterprise Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8+ years in product management with a focus on technical infrastructure products
  • Deep expertise in Kubernetes and cloud-native networking/security
  • Strong instincts for competitive positioning and messaging consistency
  • Experience in enterprise go-to-market strategies and engagement
  • Discovery-driven approach using customer insights for prioritization
  • Excellent communication skills, capable of producing structured, decisive artifacts

Responsibilities

  • Define product vision and roadmap for Calico platform initiatives
  • Craft competitive positioning in the Kubernetes networking market
  • Develop and execute go-to-market strategies for sales and partner collaboration
  • Conduct customer discovery and validation with enterprise accounts
  • Execute cross-functional collaboration on product delivery and marketing
  • Build and maintain consistent messaging and positioning for the product
  • Own and drive the closure of the first five deals, creating a playbook for future scaling

Benefits

  • Health, vision, and dental insurance
  • Collaborative and flexible work environment
  • Opportunity to work with a diverse global team
  • Involvement in strategic decision-making at a senior level
  • Potential access to hybrid work arrangements in major offices
Full Job Description
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 own a set of high-impact, strategic initiatives across Tigera's product portfolio. This is a senior, high-ownership role spanning strategy through execution: for each initiative you take on, 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.

Your work will span the portfolio - from extending Calico's converged networking for VM workloads in Kubernetes, to newer products such as Lynx, to emerging AI- and agent-focused initiatives. Your first focus area will be matched to your strengths and our priorities, and the mix will evolve as the business grows - so this is a role for a product leader who wants range, not a single lane.

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 initiatives across the portfolio - Calico, Lynx, and emerging AI-focused products - 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 falsify 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 market.
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. 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.

With offices in San Francisco, San Jose, Vancouver (Canada), Cork (Ireland), and London (England), we have a thriving team of diverse individuals from all over the world. We believe in a collaborative, flexible work environment based on respect for, and commitment from, every employee. We also offer a competitive compensation package along with full health, vision, and dental benefits. These benefits, coupled with an amazing team of individuals who believe in our mission and value openness, collaboration, and teamwork, make Tigera an awesome place to work.

About Tigera

Tigera provides Zero Trust network security and continuous compliance for Kubernetes platforms. Tigera's technology is used by some of the world's largest banks, insurance companies, and media companies to secure their cloud-native applications. Tigera's technology is based on the open-source Calico project, which is widely used in the Kubernetes community. Tigera was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Learn more about Tigera
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2016
Revenue
$30 million

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at Tigera

More Enterprise Technology Jobs

Find similar Principal Product Manager- Calico Platform jobs: