Confluent - Senior Product Manager, Cluster Linking

Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. Your Role and Responsibilities About the Role: Cluster Linking is how Kafka clusters are replicated, and it sits at the very core of Confluent. When a global bank architects zero-data-loss disaster recovery, when an enterprise migrates petabytes off open-source Kafka, or when a multinational replicates event streams across three continents, they're running on Cluster Linking. This role will define the future of Cluster Linking: how we deliver seamless disaster recovery for Kafka workloads, how we build self-service migration paths into Confluent Cloud, and how we enable cross-organization data sharing to power real-time, operational data exchanges. Cluster Linking is one of Confluent's fastest-growing platform products and you'll own that growth. Our largest customers depend on it, and because it cuts across Kafka, cloud infrastructure, networking, and security, your work will have visibility and influence across the company. What You Will Do: * Launch and drive adoption for our one-click DR initiative. Take disaster recovery from a manually configured capability to a seamless, productized experience that customers can adopt with confidence. * Define the future of real-time stream sharing across organizations, including its security model, networking, access controls, and how it scales across organizations and use cases. * Power capabilities that let customers migrate to Confluent in a few clicks or API calls. Define the art of the possible and make the migration path a reason to choose Confluent. * Segment and re-package Cluster Linking. The product serves Disaster Recovery, migrations, data sharing, and cross-cloud replication, each with different customer needs and pricing dynamics. Define how we package, price, and position each so the offering works for customers and drives growth. * Partner closely with your engineering manager counterpart as a strategic partner. Use that partnership to understand tradeoffs, make decisions fast, and keep the product moving forward. * Work directly with customers. You'll be pulled in many directions, customers will ask a lot of you. Your job is to steer them toward the right architectures and models, get them excited about what's coming, listen to what they need next, and balance the present opportunity with where the product is headed. * Drive results. Run campaigns with sellers and solutions engineers, lead webinars, assemble teams of subject matter experts, and do what it takes to move your priorities forward. * Influence and energize the people around you. Confluent moves fast and people are ready to help. Harness that, get teams excited, rally cross-functional support, and turn organizational momentum into product momentum. Required Skills * 5+ years of product management experience, ideally in infrastructure, data platforms, or cloud products. You've shipped technical products and driven measurable outcomes. * Genuine interest in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure. Kafka is not simple. You don't need prior Kafka expertise, but you need to be energized by technical depth, not put off by it. * A results-driven mindset. You don't wait for things to happen, you make them happen. You get on calls with sellers, you pull in the right people, and you keep pushing until the work is done. * Proven ability to influence. You get people excited and aligned, across engineering, field, sales, finance, and leadership, often without formal authority. * Strong ownership mentality. You take responsibility from day one. You drive ambiguous problems to clarity, remove blockers, and treat the product like your own business. * Business thinking beyond the backlog. You think about segmentation, packaging, pricing, and market impact, not just features. You understand that how a product is offered matters as much as what it does. * Clear communication. You can make technical topics understandable for executive audiences, write sharp product docs, and present confidently to customers and leadership. * LLM or GenAI knowledge is a bonus, but not required Preferred Skills • Expertise in Market Analysis: Experience with analyzing market trends, customer needs, and competitor activity to inform product definition and stay ahead of competitors. • Product Roadmap Development: Experience in defining product roadmaps, pricing, and ecosystem strategies to achieve market leadership, including developing and executing product plans. • Cross-Functional Team Collaboration: Experience managing and guiding cross-functional teams, including design, product marketing, ecosystem partners, analysts, engineering, sales, and services teams, to deliver successful products. Additional Details Must have the ability to work in Canada without sponsorship. This role will involve working with technology that is covered by Export Regulations sanctions. If you are a Foreign National from any of the following US sanctioned countries (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia regions of Ukraine) on a work permit, you are not eligible for employment in this position. Compensation, Benefits and Work Authorization The salary range for the position is based on a full-time schedule. Your ultimate salary within this range may vary depending on your job-related skills and experience for this position.