Principal Product Manager - Console

Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Our customers range from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers. Lambda's mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone the power of superintelligence. One person, one GPU. If you'd like to build the world's best AI cloud, join us. *Note: This position requires presence in our Bellevue or San Francisco office location 4 days per week; Lambda’s designated work from home day is currently Tuesday. About the Role The console is where every service Lambda sells meets the human user at the customer. It is the place where disparate products can come together to create a unified experience that solves a customer problem. Conversely, it is also the place where a cloud most easily becomes hard to use, because each service is built by a different team at a different time, and every one of them arrives with its own idea of what a resource is called, where it lives, who is allowed to touch it, and what a customer should do next. The customer does not experience a portfolio of services. They experience one product, and they judge us on whether it holds together. This role owns that product. You own the console as a single surface, with one navigation model, one identity and permissions story, one set of interaction patterns, and one vocabulary, across On-Demand GPU Instances, reserved capacity, 1-Click Clusters, bare metal, storage, networking, Managed Kubernetes, billing, and support. Every service team ships into that surface, and the standards are yours to set. Your job is to make the whole thing feel like it was designed on purpose, which means writing the standards down, reviewing the work against them, and being the person who says no when a service wants to solve a problem in a way that only makes sense from inside that team. Three very different people have to succeed here. A machine learning researcher wants a graphics processing unit (GPU) in minutes and should never have to learn cloud vocabulary to get one. An infrastructure engineer runs large clusters, lives in the application programming interface (API) and the command line, and needs the console to agree exactly with both. A platform engineer is building their own service on top of Lambda for their own users, and needs the console to make clear what their teams can see, spend, and change. The hard part of the role is that these three pull in different directions, and the surface cannot be quietly bent toward whichever one showed up in the last customer meeting. Great product managers at Lambda are defined by three things: insight, influence, and execution. Insight means you look at the data, determine what it means for customers and business, and then figure out what to do about it. But, a great idea doesn't mean anything in a vacuum. That is where influence comes in. Influence means you take that idea and get others to want to buy into it; you win over engineers, designers, executives, and partners without relying on authority. But a great idea that everyone is excited about doesn't matter unless it is delivered to customers. Execution means you work with the right people to get the idea launched, then measure and iterate. We hire product managers who learn new domains fast and reason rigorously from evidence. Deep experience owning a customer-facing console for a cloud or developer platform is highly desired. At Lambda, we don't work in silos, we work together, each bringing our particular crafts, to build the best customer experience as one team. This role is where that commitment is tested most often. Be clear-eyed about the starting point. Several of the standards this role depends on do not exist yet, so the first year includes writing them and building the design and front-end engineering partnership that keeps them alive. This is a role for someone who wants to establish the function, not inherit it. If you have held a cloud console together across a growing portfolio and want to do it while the portfolio is still being built, we'd love to hear from you. We value diverse backgrounds, experiences, and skills, and we are excited to hear from candidates who can bring unique perspectives to our team. If you do not exactly meet this description but believe you may be a good fit, please still apply and help us understand your readiness for this role. What You'll Do - Own the Whole Surface: Hold the product definition for the console as one product, decide what belongs in it and what does not, rank and sequence the work, and be honest about what Lambda is not doing this year and why. - Set the Patterns and Hold Them: Define the navigation, identity, permissions presentation, resource naming, states, errors, and empty screens that every service uses, write them down clearly enough that a team can build to them without asking you, then establish and run the review that console work passes before it ships. - Keep the Console Honest With the API: Make sure the console, the API, the command line, and infrastructure as code describe the same resources with the same names and the same rules, and treat a console-only capability as a problem to be fixed rather than a feature. - Fix the First Hour, Then Serve the Expert: Own what happens between signing up and running a first workload, instrument it well enough to know exactly where people stop, and keep the paths that operators and platform teams live in, like bulk actions, filtering, deep links, quotas, spend visibility, and access control, first class rather than an afterthought behind a wizard. - Find the Real Problem: Get close to customers, support tickets, escalations, and session data, and work out what is actually blocking people rather than what they asked for. - Write the Definition: Produce requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria precise enough that engineering and design build from them without a translation layer.