Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Principal Product Manager role stands out in the infrastructure SaaS layer where product decisions are tightly coupled to platform adoption. Calico sits in the Kubernetes networking and security category, and the listing points to a market shift toward running containers and virtual machines together, plus productionising AI workloads. That combination makes the product surface area unusually cross cutting, spanning performance, reliability, and security expectations that enterprise buyers treat as non negotiable.
For a SaaS product leader, the career value is in operating at the intersection of deep technical domains and commercial outcomes. The remit includes taking a major initiative from MVP through GA, shaping positioning in a competitive market, and translating customer discovery into roadmap sequencing. It also builds experience with enterprise go to market mechanics, including partner ecosystems and sales enablement, which are transferable across many B2B SaaS companies selling platform products.
This role is best suited to a senior PM who prefers high ownership, evidence led decision making, and structured communication. It will fit someone comfortable moving between engineering detail and executive level narratives, and who enjoys working directly with enterprise customers and internal revenue teams to turn platform capabilities into repeatable adoption."""
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Tigera provides Calico, a unified network security and observability platform to prevent, detect and mitigate security breaches in Kubernetes clusters. Tigera’s open-source offering, Calico Open Source, is the most widely adopted container networking and security solution.
Powering more than 100M containers across 8M+ nodes in 166 countries, Calico software is supported across all major cloud providers and Kubernetes distributions, and is used by leading companies including Discover, Chipotle, NBCUniversal, HanseMerkur, Box, Siemens Healthineers, Playtech, Royal Bank of Canada, and Bell Canada.
As our team grows, we are looking for colleagues who not only share our passion for this work and growing our company, but who will also strengthen our company values and help ensure that Tigera remains a great place to work. At our core, our focus is on our customers, who are the heroes of our story; on aiming high and staying nimble in how we get there; on continuous learning to drive our success; and on respecting, collaborating, and supporting each other on a daily basis.
If you are looking to help make a substantial impact, and our values and products align with your vision of your career growth, we want to hear from you!
About Your Role
A once-in-a-decade shift is reshaping enterprise infrastructure. Nearly every enterprise is moving toward a single, self-hosted platform that can run both containers and virtual machines — to raise hardware utilization, cut costs, and simplify operations. Steep price hikes from legacy virtualization vendors are accelerating the shift, pushing organizations to migrate their VM estates onto Kubernetes at speed — each move carrying unique and complex networking requirements.
At the same time, enterprises are taking AI applications and AI agents from pilot to production, and increasingly hosting their own open LLMs to control token costs and keep models close to the proprietary data that lives in their data centers. It all converges on one requirement: a single platform that can host containers and VMs together — spanning data centers and regions, with enterprise-grade HA and DR, high performance, low latency, and massive scale.
The networking that makes these converged platforms work is extraordinarily complex and almost always on the critical path. Tigera has built the best-in-class networking solution for this new generation of converged platforms — and this role sits at the center of that opportunity.
We are hiring a Principal Product Manager to help drive the strategy and evolution of the Calico platform. This is a senior, high-ownership role spanning strategy through execution: you will define product vision, shape go-to-market, and partner directly with engineering, sales, marketing, and ecosystem partners to bring new capabilities to market. You will own strategic initiatives across the platform over time — the first being to extend Calico's converged networking for VM workloads in Kubernetes, from initial MVP through GA and the roadmap beyond — while taking on additional platform bets as the business grows.
For this position, we are looking to hire in the San Francisco Bay Area (US), hybrid at our San Francisco or San Jose office.
San Francisco Bay Area Salary Range: $220,000 - $240,000 OTE
You Will Own:
- Product vision & roadmap for major Calico platform initiatives — from MVP to GA and the phased roadmap that follows, sequenced by customer value and revenue impact.
- Competitive positioning in the Kubernetes networking and security market. You will craft differentiated narratives that lead with platform value — unified networking, best-in-class microsegmentation and DNS policy, cluster-mesh, observability — rather than competing feature-for-feature at the dataplane layer.
- Go-to-market strategy across both sales-led motions (sales enablement, crisp platform pitches, close partnership with sales on qualified opportunities) and partner-led motions with the ecosystem of platform and infrastructure partners.
- Customer discovery & validation with enterprise accounts — running structured interviews to pressure-test and validate assumptions before committing engineering resources.
- Cross-functional execution with engineering on scope and delivery, and with marketing on messaging discipline and campaigns that shape market perception.
- Messaging & positioning discipline — building canonical positioning artifacts and driving consistency in how the product is described across the organization, to customers, and in to the market
- Ownership of the first five deals - Roll up your sleeves and own the process of closing the first five deals. Abstract learnings, share learnings broadly with the extended team, tune the strategy, build a repeatable playbook and enable the sales and solutions engineering teams to scale the business.
You Have:
- 8+ years in product management, including senior/principal-level ownership of technical infrastructure products, with a track record of taking products from vision to GA and revenue.
- Deep Kubernetes and cloud-native networking/security expertise — CNI, network policy, microsegmentation, L2/L3 networking concepts, eBPF, and the broader cloud-native ecosystem.
- Sharp competitive and positioning instincts — able to build canonical positioning artifacts (single-line description, problem/audience, category framing, differentiators, explicit "what it is not" boundaries) and enforce messaging consistency across the org.
- Enterprise GTM range — comfortable enabling sales, engaging senior technical buyers at large enterprises, and driving partner co-selling.
- Discovery-driven and evidence-based — you pressure-test assumptions with customer interviews and prioritize by revenue impact rather than work type.
- Crisp communicator and operator — structured, low-friction, and factually disciplined; you move quickly from insight to a decision-ready artifact.
Why This Role Matters:
Calico sits at the center of how modern enterprises connect and secure their infrastructure for cloud native applications and AI Agents. As a Principal Product Manager, you will own strategic bets that shape the platform's direction and reframe how the market thinks about Calico — working directly with company leadership on some of Tigera's most consequential decisions.
With offices in San Francisco, San Jose, Vancouver (Canada), Cork (Ireland), and London (England), we have a thriving team of diverse individuals from all over the world. We believe in a collaborative, flexible work environment based on respect for, and commitment from, every employee. We also offer a competitive compensation package along with full health, vision, and dental benefits. These benefits, coupled with an amazing team of individuals who believe in our mission and value openness, collaboration, and teamwork, make Tigera an awesome place to work.
