Principal Product Manager, Certificate Authority

Description

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s 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 Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.

At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re 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 you’re 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, you’ll 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 Cloudflare's 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 Cloudflare's 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 Cloudflare's CA business across publicly trusted certificates, certificate lifecycle automation, ACME issuance, renewal workflows, revocation, Certificate Transparency, customer controls, developer experience, and integrations with Cloudflare's 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, Let's 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.

Conditions

Equity

This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s 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?
• We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re 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, we've equipped more than 2,400 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 Cloudflare’s 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, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.
• 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. Here’s the deal - we don’t 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 you’d like to be a part of? We’d 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.