Product Manager, Safe Change & Control Plane
Job description
About Us
At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.
At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in.
Available Locations: London or Austin
At Cloudflare, our mission is to build a better Internet by giving customers control on they might introduce configuration changes so that they are safe, reliable, and predictable at scale.
We are looking for a Product Manager to lead Safe Change for Cloudflare’s control plane. In this role, you will define how customers preview, stage, roll out, monitor, and recover from configuration changes. You will also shape platform foundations that enable internal teams to deploy changes with higher confidence, stronger guardrails, and lower operational risk.
Cloudflare’s control plane converts dashboard and API changes into global network configurations. Today’s enterprise customers expect robust change-management features: deployment previews, gradual rollouts, quick rollbacks, versioning, traffic segmentation, data residency, auditability, and verification of applied state.
You will own a high-leverage product domain spanning distributed systems, reliability, developer experience, and enterprise governance. Working closely with engineering and product leaders across the entire platform. You will help turn proven deployment safety patterns into reusable platform primitives across Cloudflare.
This technical, highly collaborative role requires navigating architectural tradeoffs with engineers, evaluating risk and compliance with enterprise customers, and partnering with product and go-to-market teams to drive platform adoption.
What you’ll do
As a member of a growing team of infrastructure product managers your responsibilities include:
- Represent the customer, be it internal or external. Be the champion and voice of customers. Build intimate, personal customer relationships. Bring the customer's voice into the creation process.
- Develop the product vision for your area. Ensure that your vision can work not just for your current set of customers, but for 10 or even 100 times your current set.
- Evangelize the vision so that all stakeholders are aligned, have context and understand where we are going.
- Make data-driven roadmap decisions. Make tough tactical prioritization decisions based off of data you collect, curate, and disseminate. Build trust with stakeholders by ensuring that your roadmap is understandable and sensible based on the data you present.
- Measure success. Own the measures used to define success for your product. Success measures must be defined at the inception of a product and tracked throughout its lifecycle. Make measures visible to all stakeholders and interpret them into actionable conclusions and new hypotheses.
- Author use cases and prioritize requirements. Translate observations and customer feedback into a prioritized product backlog. Author use cases based on specific real-world product applications and extrapolate detailed product requirements for the scenarios.
- Collaborate across teams. We win or lose as a team. Product managers play a critical role in creating alignment between engineering teams and stakeholders. A collaborative attitude is essential to the job.
Examples of desirable skills, knowledge, and experience
The ideal candidate is customer-focused, data-driven, methodical and thrives in a goal-oriented and data-driven environment. You have a deep technical understanding of the observability space and outstanding communication and collaboration skills. You are able to work with a diverse group, get consensus, and drive the product forward. You are execution focused, you emphasize getting things done while paying attention to important details. You have a passion for building frameworks that scale massively and make it easy for all teams to get the most out of data as you.
- 4+ years of previous product management experience
- Domain expertise in making deployment decisions based on data. You have been there, done that as either an architect or product owner for safe change or very closely related technology space
- Distributed systems experience that allows you to drive the scaling strategy for deployment as our scale grows both on volume and number of internal customers supporting.
- Experience presenting new products and features to customers – whether as a developer, analyst or product manager. You are enthusiastic about taking something you have helped build and sharing it with the world
- Strong customer and stakeholder empathy. You must be the voice of engineering, customers, support, or ops at any given time. You must be able to channel many points of view into a strategic roadmap and deliverables that provide elegant solutions to all requirements.
- Exceptional communication, presentation, organizational and analytical skills
- Demonstrated ability to lead, drive consensus and deliver in a matrixed organization with multiple stakeholders
- Experience working with large and complex data sets (SQL, Postgres, Prometheus, etc.). You are skilled at proving points with data and can quickly show others how to do so.
- Experience with telemetry pipelines (Metrics/Traces) and a very good understanding of modern observability platforms
- Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to all audiences
Bonus points
- BS/MS in a technology- or business-related field
- Experience with deployment platforms, release engineering, progressive delivery, feature flags, GitOps, IaC, or incident management.
- Background in networking, security, CDN, edge computing, observability, or large-scale SaaS environments.
- Hands-on experience with APIs, CLIs, telemetry tools, or scripting (e.g., Python, Go, JavaScript).
- Experience building platform capabilities adopted by multiple product teams.
- Experience working with enterprise customers subject to strict change-management, compliance, or data residency mandates.
What success looks like
A successful Product Manager will establish Safe Change as an adopted, trusted platform capability across Cloudflare. First-year success includes:
- A clear product strategy and roadmap for Safe Customer Change, aligned with internal rollout and control plane initiatives.
- Shipped customer capabilities for previewing and staging rollouts, backed by measurable adoption and safety metrics.
- Strong cross-functional partnerships with product and engineering teams integrating safe-change capabilities.
- A clear trajectory from near-term safety tooling to core control plane features (versioning, rollback, segmentation, data residency).
- Measurable reduction in operational risk, redundant tooling, and execution ambiguity across change workflows.
Compensation
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.
Equity
This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.
Benefits
Cloudflare offers a complete package of benefits and programs to support you and your family. Our benefits programs can help you pay health care expenses, support caregiving, build capital for the future and make life a little easier and fun! The below is a description of our benefits for employees in the United States, and benefits may vary for employees based outside the U.S.
Health & Welfare Benefits
- Medical/Rx Insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Commuter Spending Accounts
- Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
- On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
- Global Travel Medical Insurance
Financial Benefits
- Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
- Life & Accident Insurance
- 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
- Employee Stock Participation Plan
Time Off
- Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
- Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave
What Makes Cloudflare Special?
We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet.
Project Galileo: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.
Athenian Project: In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.
: We released to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.
Sound like something you’d like to be a part of? We’d love to hear from you!
Please note that applicants who progress to the offer stage of the interview process may be asked to attend an in-person interview within one of the Cloudflare Offices or Cloudflare Hubs. More details about this will be available at that stage of the interview process.
This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Please note that any offer of employment may be conditioned on your authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license.
Cloudflare is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people and place great value in both diversity and inclusiveness. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to their, or any other person's, perceived or actual race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care status, or any other basis protected by law. We are an AA/Veterans/Disabled Employer.
Cloudflare provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job. Examples of reasonable accommodations include, but are not limited to, changing the application process, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment. If you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job, please contact us via e-mail at [email protected] or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco, CA 94107.
Skills mentioned

At Cloudflare, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal: to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers approximately 25 million Internet properties, for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. We realize people do not fit into neat boxes. We are looking for curious and empathetic individuals who are committed to developing themselves and learning new skills, and we are ready to help you do that. We cannot complete our mission without building a diverse and inclusive team. We hire the best people based on an evaluation of their potential and support them throughout their time at Cloudflare. Come join us! What we do Anytime we push code, it automatically affects millions of Internet properties. Every day, thousands of new customers sign up for Cloudflare service. We serve 46 million HTTP requests per second on average. We serve data from 300 cities in over 100 countries around the world. Our Story How Cloudflare Began In 2004, Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway set out to answer the basic question: “Where does email spam come from?” The two of them built a system that allowed anyone with a website to track how spammers harvested email addresses. Project Honey Pot was born. Project Honey Pot quietly grew over the years. Lee’s flexible architecture adapted to track more of the threats that web administrators faced. Thousands of websites, from more than 185 countries, signed up to participate in the project. While users loved Project Honey Pot’s ability to track online malicious behavior, they had one repeated request: don’t just track the bad guys, stop them. Cloudflare's First Office in Palo Alto In 2009, Matthew had taken a sabbatical from his full time work to get his MBA from the Harvard Business School. There he met Michelle Zatlyn, now Cloudflare’s Chief Operating Officer. The two were talking one day when Matthew mentioned Project Honey Pot and its amazing community of users. Michelle immediately recognized the opportunity to create a service that would take Project Honey Pot to the next level: not just tracking Internet threats, but stopping them too. The classmates started to work on a business plan. One of the first orders of business was coming up with a name. The first business plan was titled “Project Web Wall,” but that hardly resonated. A friend of Matthew’s suggested that they were creating a “firewall in the cloud,” so it should be known as Cloudflare. The name immediately felt right and stuck. Matthew and Michelle worked with the faculty at the Harvard Business School to refine the business plan. In the meantime, Lee built the first working prototype in his spare time. In April 2009, Cloudflare won the prestigious Harvard Business School Business Plan competition. Lee was based in California and, after graduating from HBS, Michelle and Matthew headed west. The three co-founders spent the summer refining the Cloudflare prototype. They felt that Cloudflare solved a real need and set out to take Cloudflare to the next level. In November of 2009, Cloudflare closed its Series A financing with Ray Rothrock, from Venrock, and Carl Ledbetter, from Pelion Venture Partners. Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn, Lee Holloway Matthew, Lee, and Michelle began to build the Cloudflare team. Recruiting before you have a product is always tricky, but one thing resonated with everyone: Cloudflare's core mission is to help build a better Internet. That was a project that smart engineers could get passionate about. Soon Cloudflare’s Palo Alto, CA offices began to fill with a talented team who hailed from top companies like Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Mint.com. The biggest concern that investors and advisors had was that Cloudflare’s solution, which was originally focused on securing websites, would introduce latency. The team became obsessed with stamping out latency anywhere in the system. In June 2010, Cloudflare quietly launched a private beta to select members of the Project Honey Pot community. The whole team held their breath. Then something surprising happened. Users began writing in that not only was Cloudflare protecting them against online bad guys, but their sites were loading, on average, 30% faster. The efficiency of Cloudflare’s system, the layer of caching for static resources, and the fact that Cloudflare was taking so much garbage traffic off its user’s sites meant Cloudflare not only offered security, it also offered incredible performance. From the first discussions of Cloudflare back on the Harvard Business School’s campus in 2009, the plan was always to launch at TechCrunch. On September 27, 2010, Cloudflare did just that. The entire Cloudflare team gathered in an auditorium in downtown San Francisco at TechCrunch Disrupt. Early beta users were excited about finally being able to talk about the cool service they’d been using for months. And Matthew and Michelle stepped on stage to announce to the world Cloudflare’s launch. Since then, Cloudflare has launched dozens of products and hundreds of features over the course of 6 years, opened 6 offices across 3 countries, and brought 300 data centers online. All of these efforts have brought Cloudflare's benefits: security, performance, reliability and insights, to millions of customers around the globe. What Makes Cloudflare Special? We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the free and open Internet. Project Galileo: We equip politically and artistically important organizations and journalists with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost. Athenian Project: We created Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Path Forward Partnership: Since 2016, we have partnered with Path Forward, a nonprofit organization, to create 16-week positions for mid-career professionals who want to get back to the workplace after taking time off to care for a child, parent, or loved one. 1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released. Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever. We will continue to abide by our privacy commitment and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.
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