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. - Work as a Group: Partner with the product managers who own each service so their launches land inside your surface as one product, and agree the seams early rather than at launch review. - Land the Launch: Set launch criteria that include documentation, in-product guidance, support readiness, and accessibility, and get them met before the surface goes live rather than after. - Measure and Iterate: Define success before you ship, then go find out whether it happened, using completion rates, time to first result, and support load rather than opinion. - Make the Call Stick: Take a position on contested tradeoffs, write it down well enough that people can disagree with it precisely, and keep owning the decision after it is made. You - Have 10+ years of product management experience, including owning a customer-facing console, dashboard, or developer surface for a cloud, infrastructure, or developer platform. - Have shipped interaction patterns, a design system, or a surface standard that teams you did not manage adopted and kept using after you stopped pushing, and can describe how you actually got them to. - Have taken a set of separately built product surfaces and made them behave like one product, and can say what you consolidated, what you left alone, and why. - Understand cloud infrastructure well enough to reason with engineers about identity, permissions, quotas, regions, capacity, telemetry, and billing, and about what should and should not be exposed to a customer. - Understand access control models for organizations, teams, projects, roles, and API keys well enough to design how they are presented, because this is where a console either works for a platform team or does not. - Able to define iterative plans that move an organization from the current state towards the desired outcome. - Have made one product serve both a first-time user and a daily operator without turning it into two products. - Have used research and instrumentation to settle a disagreement about a user experience, and are comfortable being the person who brings evidence to a room full of strong opinions. - Can turn ambiguous customer, technical, and commercial inputs into product definition that multiple teams execute against. - Communicate plainly, write well, say no clearly, and make decisions easier for people who do not all share the same context. Nice to Have - Experience with machine learning or data platform surfaces, like notebooks, training jobs, model endpoints, or experiment tracking. - Experience with the self-serve funnel from signup to first paid usage, including conversion and activation work. - Experience partnering closely with a front-end platform team on a component library, design tokens, or a shared application shell. - Experience owning documentation or in-product guidance as part of the product rather than as a handoff. - Experience with accessibility standards and with making an infrastructure product usable under them. - Experience with a console that had to serve both a human and an automated caller, and opinions about what that costs. Salary Range Information The annual salary range for this position has been set based on market data and other factors. However, a salary higher or lower than this range may be appropriate for a candidate whose qualifications differ meaningfully from those listed in the job description. About Lambda - Founded in 2012, with 500+ employees, and growing fast - Our investors notably include TWG Global, US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Andra Capital, SGW, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, NVIDIA, Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, Wiwynn, Gradient Ventures, Mercato Partners, SVB, 1517, and Crescent Cove - We have research papers accepted at top machine learning and graphics conferences, including NeurIPS, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and TOG - Our values are publicly available: https://lambda.ai/careers - We offer generous cash & equity compensation - Health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents - Wellness and commuter stipends for select roles - 401k Plan with 2% company match (USA employees) - Flexible paid time off plan that we all actually use Equal Opportunity Employer Lambda is an Equal Opportunity employer. Applicants are considered without regard to race, color, religion, creed, national origin, age, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation and identity, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship, or any other factors prohibited by local, state, or federal law.