Senior Director, Product Management

The Senior Director, Product Management leads the product team for Azul Prime and is accountable for Prime’s growth. Prime is Azul’s high-performance JVM, and Optimizer Hub, the component that moves JIT compilation and warm-up off the JVMs and into a shared service running in the customer’s Kubernetes environment, is part of it. Prime wins when customers run Java at scale and care about latency, warm-up, and cloud cost. You set Prime’s direction, run the product managers who work on it, and answer to the CPO, CEO, CRO, and SVP of Engineering for the results. This is a player-coach role. You manage a team, and you still own the decisions on strategy, pricing, and the hardest customer conversations.

What You'll Own

• Outcomes: You own whether Prime succeeds or fails in the market. New business, pipeline, pilot-to-production conversion, expansion, renewal, and retention on Prime are your numbers, not just the field’s. You define what success looks like, instrument it, report it honestly when it is bad, and change the product or the plan when the data says the strategy is wrong.
• Strategy: Set the multi-year direction for Prime: which segments and workloads it wins, what to build versus partner for, and how it fits with Optimizer Hub, Azul Core, Intelligence Cloud, and Payara. Be explicit about what customers compare Prime against, including other JVM vendors, OpenJDK builds, and simply buying more cloud capacity. You own the thesis and you are accountable for whether it holds up.
• Executive partnership: Report to the CPO and work directly with the CEO, CRO, and CTO. Bring strategy, roadmap, and pricing decisions to the leadership team, argue for them with data, and change your mind in public when the evidence says you should. This is a visible role with real exposure.
• Go-to-market: Build and run the Prime go-to-market motion with sales, marketing, and customer success: who the buyer is, which accounts to target, what the pitch is, how pilots are structured, and what makes them convert. Work with the Prime sales specialists and field leadership on target accounts, qualification, and deal strategy. Join strategic customer and prospect calls yourself, and keep a clear, evidence-based view of why Prime deals are won, lost, and stalled.
• Roadmap: Translate strategy into a sequenced, credible roadmap, and make the trade-offs explicit rather than accidental. Build alignment across engineering, sales, and marketing around it, and inspire the teams to deliver it. Communicate it internally and to customers, hold the line on scope, and keep a heavy bias for action.
• Pricing and packaging: Own how Prime is priced, packaged, and metered, including how Optimizer Hub is packaged as part of it. Prime makes customers’ fleets more efficient, which can shrink the very footprint the price is based on, so the model has to account for that. You build the models, pressure-test them with the field, and work with finance and sales to get them approved and into market.
• Team leadership: Manage, develop, and hire the product managers on Prime. Give each PM a clear area to own and hold them to outcomes, not requirements. Set the standard for how the team works: written strategy and decisions, customer evidence behind every roadmap call, and AI tools used in daily product work.
• Inbound product management: Make sure the team works with engineering beyond writing requirements: in the sprints, in design reviews, and in the implementation trade-offs. Customer requirement sessions, customer-facing technical documentation, and the operator experience of installing, sizing, and running Optimizer Hub on Kubernetes all sit with your team.
• Outbound product management: Partner with marketing on positioning, launches, sales enablement, and public-facing content. Run competitive and market research. Make sure the Prime story lands with developers, platform teams, and the executives who sign.
• Technical credibility: Hold your own with the engineering teams. You understand JVM architecture and principles of operation, JIT compilation, garbage collection, and warm-up in particular, well enough that engineers treat you as a peer rather than a requirements conduit, and a customer’s platform engineers and CTO do too.

What You'll Bring (aka Experience, Skills, Education)

• 15+ years in engineering and/or product roles, with a strong track record of launching and scaling products to revenue.
• 10+ years in product management, including owning a product or product line end to end: strategy through launch through revenue.
• 5+ years managing teams, including hiring, developing, and managing product managers.
• Track record shipping enterprise infrastructure or developer software sold to platform and engineering teams, such as language runtimes, application performance, observability, or cloud cost optimization.
• Ability to develop a deep working knowledge of JVM architecture and operation: JIT compilation, garbage collection, and warm-up.
• Demonstrated ownership of pricing and packaging for a technical product, including the cross-functional work of getting a model approved and into market.
• Experience building a go-to-market motion with sales: working enterprise deals, and understanding DevOps engineers, platform engineers, and developers as the key influencers in a sales cycle.
• Experience conducting market and competitor research with focus on product impacts and positioning.
• Experience directly interacting with customers and prospects - building customer relationships, discussing roadmap and strategy and conducting customer interviews.
• Strong domain knowledge of public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) and Kubernetes.
• Fluency with AI tools and experience operating in an AI-first product management organization. You use them in your daily product work and have a view on where they help and where they don’t.
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English, equally effective with an engineer and with a Fortune 100 CIO.
• Comfortable in a fully remote, async, multi-time-zone setup. Self-directed, and a strong writer, because writing is how decisions get made here.
• Comfortable in a startup-shaped environment where bringing order to chaos is part of the job.

Nice to have

• Hands-on software or quality engineering background: you have written code and debugged production systems.
• Experience with open source communities and licensing.
• Experience taking a product from early traction to a durable revenue line.
• Experience leading across more than one product at once, especially products at different stages or sold through different motions.
• Experience with infrastructure software that customers deploy and operate themselves, not just SaaS.
• Working knowledge of Java and Java development tooling.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent work experience. An advanced degree and/or relevant certifications are nice to have, but not required.

Location

This can be a fully remote role, ideally be based in one of Azul's European locations such as Prague, Czech Republic or Limassol, Cyprus, OR any other location in Europe or the EU.

What we Offer

• Comprehensive compensation and healthcare packages
• Referral Program
• Work-life balance, remote-first, paid time off, company shutdown, holidays
• Work with top experts worldwide whom contribute to the Java ecosystem

Our Culture & Values

• Maniacal Customer Focus
• Innovation & Excellence
• Initiative & Courage
• Impact & Influence
• Integrity & Transparency
• Diversity, Inclusion & Teamwork

Employment at Azul is contingent upon the completion of reference and background checks.