Principal Product Lead – DDN Horizon

DDN

Principal Product Lead for Horizon overseeing AI orchestration control plane at DDN. Drive product strategy and market execution across diverse industries, including AI and high-performance data solutions.

Posted 5/11/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesSeniorWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudKubernetes

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Co-own the Horizon product strategy, roadmap, and phased delivery plan (current release through multi-year vision), and represent product direction across executive, board, and partner forums.
Drive the end-to-end go-to-market execution for Horizon in partnership with sales, sales engineering, marketing, and services — including pricing and packaging, segmentation, positioning, enablement, and deal support for strategic opportunities.
Own cross-functional program orchestration across engineering, operations, support, customer success, and finance; anticipate dependencies, surface tradeoffs, and drive decisions on the critical path to each release and revenue milestone.
Define and evolve the operational model for Horizon as a recurring-revenue service, including delivery, support escalation, usage metering, billing integration, true-up processes, and the service-level framework across SaaS and on-premises deployments.
Lead partner and ecosystem engagement at the product level — including ongoing technology partnerships, co-selling relationships, and analyst interactions — and represent DDN in strategic customer conversations up to CxO level.
Shape the requirements and success criteria for each Horizon phase in tight collaboration with engineering architecture; convert ambiguous strategic objectives into crisp PRDs, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes.
Bring a structured voice of the customer into the roadmap by synthesizing input from design partners, early-access customers, and field teams, and by directly engaging reference accounts across regulated and sovereign segments.
Partner with marketing on positioning, messaging, and launch moments; serve as an executive-credible spokesperson for Horizon in external-facing settings where appropriate.
Operate as a thought partner to the Product Lead and to cross-functional executives — challenge assumptions, offer independent judgment, and raise the strategic caliber of the broader Horizon program.

Requirements

What you’ll need

20+ years of progressive product management experience, with a substantial portion in senior or principal-level roles driving enterprise infrastructure, cloud services, or platform products.
Demonstrated track record of taking a SaaS or cloud service from concept through general availability and into scaled commercial operation — ideally including both multi-tenant hosted and customer-deployed modes.
Deep experience across hybrid and cloud-native infrastructure: Kubernetes, multi-tenancy, identity and access management, observability, and recurring-revenue commercial models.
Proven ability to operate fluidly across the full commercial surface of a product — pricing, packaging, sales enablement, deal structure, analyst relations, partner management, and executive-level customer engagement.
Exceptional cross-functional leadership: a consistent history of building durable partnerships with engineering, sales, finance, marketing, and operations counterparts, and of earning trust quickly across a large, distributed organization.
Strong commercial judgment — comfort with business model design, unit economics, margin structure, and the tradeoffs between short-term revenue capture and long-term platform positioning.
Excellent written and verbal communication; can write the executive brief, the PRD, and the customer-ready narrative with equal fluency.
Bachelor's degree in a relevant technical or business discipline, or equivalent experience.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Competitive salary
Flexible working hours
Professional development opportunities
Leading global AI expertise
Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer

ATS Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

product managementSaaScloud servicesKubernetesidentity and access managementobservabilitycommercial model designpricing strategypackagingsales enablement

Soft Skills

cross-functional leadershipcommunicationstrategic thinkingpartnership buildingtrust buildingexecutive engagementjudgmentcollaborationproblem-solvingcustomer engagement