Confluent - Senior Product Manager I - Cloud Gross Margin & Global Expansion

Introduction

As a Product Manager in Pricing & Monetization, you’ll own the gross margin and global footprint of Confluent Cloud. That covers what it costs to serve every customer, workload, and product, where we expand next, and how cost and demand shape what we build, how we buy cloud infrastructure, and how we price. You’ll partner with Infrastructure Engineering, Finance, Procurement, our cloud provider partnership teams, Sales, and Deal Desk.

• You will own the cost model that turns cloud provider spend into a trusted unit cost for every Confluent Cloud product, SKU, region, and customer.

• You will own the business case for new markets and regions, matching global demand with infrastructure deployments that earn their return.

• Your work will shape how Confluent buys from AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, where Confluent Cloud is available, how new products and architectures are designed for margin, and how cost is reflected in pricing.

• You’ll make gross margin something the business can see, predict, and steer, including as Confluent’s financial reporting integrates with IBM’s

Your role and responsibilities

What You Will Do

• Build and own the Confluent Cloud COGS and unit economics model, including the allocation method for shared multi-tenant infrastructure, so every product, SKU, and customer has a defensible cost to serve.

• Build the contribution margin forecast that connects consumption growth, product mix, regional footprint, architecture changes, and cloud commitments to future gross margin, and use it to set and track margin targets.

• Partner with Infrastructure Engineering to find, size, and prioritize cost reduction opportunities across compute, storage, and networking, and drive them onto the engineering roadmap.

• Partner with Procurement and our cloud provider partnership teams to capture savings through contract negotiations, savings plans, committed use discounts, and marketplace terms, and manage Confluent’s commitment burn-down against those agreements.

• Lead new markets and regional expansion: size demand across geographies, cloud providers, and regulated markets, using signals such as lost deals, pipeline, marketplace demand, and data residency requirements, and build ROI-based business cases for new region launches.

• Own the regional footprint across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure: define the minimum viable deployment for each new region, track payback against plan, and recommend when to scale, consolidate, or retire capacity.

• Set regional pricing strategy with the Pricing team so price reflects differences in regional cost to serve, and make explicit, measured decisions where strategic regions run below target margin.

• Make gross margin a first-class input to product development: review the cost footprint of every new product introduction and major architecture change (such as edge deployments, multi-region clusters, and networking redesigns) before launch, and own the margin section of product launch reviews.

• Build cost transparency into pricing, including a consistent, single networking charge across product lines, and work with Commit Estimator and Deal Desk to set margin guardrails on committed deals.

• Analyze margin by customer, cohort, region, and channel to identify unprofitable usage patterns, and recommend pricing, packaging, or architectural fixes.

• Model the cost of free tiers, trials, and promotional credits so self-serve growth is efficient by design.

• Set the unit cost framework for emerging cost categories, including AI inference and GPU-backed capabilities, before pricing is set.

• Define and report success metrics such as gross margin by product and region, unit cost trends, savings captured, regional payback, and forecast accuracy, and communicate them clearly to senior leadership.

Required technical and professional expertise

• 5+ years in product management, FinOps, cloud economics, or a similar role at a B2B SaaS or cloud infrastructure company, with direct accountability for cloud cost or gross margin outcomes.

• Deep, hands-on knowledge of AWS, Google Cloud, and/or Azure billing and cost data (cost and usage reports, billing exports, cost management tooling), and of commitment instruments such as savings plans, reserved instances, and committed use discounts.

• Experience building driver-based cost or margin models that Finance trusts and Engineering acts on, including allocating shared infrastructure costs across products or customers.

• Experience building investment business cases that combine demand sizing, fixed and variable cost, and payback analysis, such as region launches, capacity investments, or market entry.

• Ability to translate distributed systems architecture into cost drivers, with credibility with infrastructure engineers on compute, storage, and network trade-offs.

• Proven ability to influence without authority across Engineering, Finance, Procurement, Data Science and Sales, and to turn cost and demand analysis into repeatable roadmap, footprint, and pricing decisions.

• Strong analytical skills (advanced Excel or Google Sheets required; SQL required, BigQuery preferred).

• Clear written and verbal communication: you can explain a margin trade-off to an engineer in one conversation and to an executive on one page.

• Hands-on use of AI tools in your daily work for research, analysis, and automation.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• FinOps Certified Practitioner or equivalent FinOps Foundation credential.

• Experience negotiating or supporting enterprise cloud contracts (EDP, PPA, MACC) or managing cloud marketplace economics.

• Experience launching or expanding cloud services into new regions, including data residency, sovereignty, or regulated-market requirements.

• Familiarity with data streaming or data infrastructure cost structures, such as Apache Kafka, cross-zone replication, and tiered storage.

• Experience with usage-based pricing, regional pricing, rating platforms such as Metronome, or deal pricing tools.

• Finance, FP&A, strategy, or consulting experience.

• A computer science or engineering degree, or prior engineering experience

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.