Principal Product Manager, Certificate Authority

About Us

At Cloudflare we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the worlds 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 Magazines Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the Worlds Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

At Cloudflare were not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; were 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 youre 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 youll fit right in.

Available Locations: Austin or London

About the Role

TLS is the connective tissue of the Internet and Cloudflare terminates a large fraction of it. Cloudflare sits in front of more than 20 percent of global Internet request traffic and terminates TLS for millions of domains. Every day our network handles certificate operations across products like Universal SSL SSL for SaaS Origin CA Cloudflare Access and Cloudflare Tunnel.

That scale has taught us how the WebPKI ecosystem works from the consuming side. As certificate lifetimes shorten agentic activity increases and post-quantum certificates move toward production the number of certificates the Internet depends on will grow dramatically.

Cloudflare is building a certificate authority for the whole Internet: a public redundant transparent CA that provides another trusted source of automated certificates and helps make the encrypted web more resilient. We intend to be ACME-first automation-first and transparent by design. We also intend to lead where the ecosystem is going including post-quantum certificates and Merkle Tree Certificates while continuing to support the classic WebPKI customers rely on today.

As Principal Product Manager for Cloudflares Certificate Authority business you will define the product strategy roadmap customer experience and commercial model for this new venture. You will work across product engineering security compliance legal operations sales marketing and the WebPKI ecosystem to turn Cloudflares CA from a major technical commitment into a product customers trust and adopt.

This is an early-days role on a growing team. It is not a role for someone who only manages backlog. The right person will be comfortable with high-consequence infrastructure deep customer discovery ecosystem trust compliance scrutiny and zero-to-one product building. The decisions you make in the first year will shape how Cloudflare participates in the certificate authority market for years to come.

Responsibilities

• Define the product strategy for Cloudflares CA business across publicly trusted certificates certificate lifecycle automation ACME issuance renewal workflows revocation Certificate Transparency customer controls developer experience and integrations with Cloudflares broader platform.
• Build for the whole Internet by understanding the needs of developers site owners platform teams SaaS providers enterprise security teams infrastructure operators and partners who depend on certificates for availability security and compliance.
• Make resilience a product principle. Help design product requirements that fail small reduce customer blast radius support automated recovery and make certificate replacement fast enough to handle compliance issues revocation events or ecosystem incidents.
• Drive an ACME-first customer experience that makes it easy for users of existing free or automated CAs to adopt Cloudflare with minimal tooling changes.
• Partner closely with engineering on systems that manage certificate lifecycles automate issuance and renewal integrate with HSMs protect keys support auditability and operate within strict reliability and correctness requirements.
• Partner with compliance legal security and operations to ensure product decisions align with CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements WebTrust audits root store program policies Certificate Policy and Certification Practice Statement commitments and public incident response expectations.
• Own go-to-market strategy including packaging pricing launch sequencing competitive positioning customer segmentation sales enablement developer messaging and adoption metrics.
• Represent the customer and the ecosystem in product decisions where trust transparency uptime security and commercial adoption must all be balanced.
• Work across Cloudflare product teams including SSL/TLS Application Security Zero Trust Workers Registrar DNS Load Balancing SaaS products and infrastructure teams that consume or expose certificate services.
• Help make Cloudflare Customer Zero by ensuring our own usage of the CA exercises the product at Cloudflare scale and informs the roadmap before customers depend on it.

Desirable Skills Knowledge and Experience

• 10 years of product management experience building technical products for developers security teams infrastructure teams enterprises or cloud platforms.
• Experience with security identity infrastructure or developer platform products where correctness reliability compliance and trust are core product requirements.
• Working knowledge of PKI and certificate lifecycle management including TLS certificates X.509 ACME public and private CAs revocation Certificate Transparency mTLS HSMs and enterprise certificate automation.
• Strong business judgment with experience defining product strategy pricing and packaging customer segmentation and go-to-market plans for technical B2B products.
• Ability to operate in ambiguity and create structure around a new business including market definition customer discovery roadmap tradeoffs launch planning and executive alignment.
• Technical fluency with engineering teams and comfort discussing APIs distributed systems key management audit trails reliability operational failure modes and security tradeoffs.
• Strong written communication for strategy documents product requirements launch narratives customer-facing messaging and high-stakes internal decisions.
• Comfort with high-consequence work. A mis-issued mis-revoked or unavailable certificate can become a public ecosystem-visible event. You need the judgment to move quickly and the discipline to be careful.

Bonus Points

• Direct experience working on certificate authority PKI certificate lifecycle management cloud security identity or trust services products.
• Experience with publicly trusted CAs private PKI managed certificate services or platforms such as AWS Certificate Manager AWS Private CA Google Trust Services DigiCert Sectigo Lets Encrypt / ISRG Entrust Microsoft PKI HashiCorp Vault PKI step-ca or CFSSL.
• Familiarity with CA/Browser Forum requirements browser root programs WebTrust for CAs WebTrust Baseline Requirements or public CA incident reporting.
• Experience building API-first developer products especially products involving ACME SDKs CLI workflows Kubernetes service mesh mTLS or infrastructure-as-code integrations.
• Experience launching new businesses or zero-to-one products inside a larger platform company.
• Familiarity with certificate automation challenges created by 90-day and shorter certificate lifetimes.
• Familiarity with post-quantum cryptography crypto-agility Merkle Tree Certificates or customer migration planning for cryptographic transitions.
• Prior participation in WebPKI IETF browser trust transparency or security standards communities.

Compensation

Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location.

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflares 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

Were not just a highly ambitious large-scale technology company. Were 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 weve equipped more than 2400 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 Cloudflares 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 weve provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.

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. Heres the deal - we dont 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 youd like to be a part of Wed 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 persons 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 or via mail at 101 Townsend St. San Francisco CA 94107.

Required Experience:

Staff IC