Technical Product Manager

Worldwide (European Hours Overlap Preferred)

Full Time

Product

The Reality

We're a 30-person company with more than 3.5 billion downloads of our open-source cloud-native proxy. Traefik runs in production across financial services, healthcare, retail, transportation, and the public sector, and it ships as the default ingress in several major Kubernetes distributions. We're building partnerships with NVIDIA, Oracle, Nutanix, HPE, SUSE, Microsoft, and more. The market moved toward us this year. Ingress NGINX is winding down, every enterprise is putting AI into production, and both of those problems land squarely on the connectivity layer we own.

With all these, product demand is outrunning what the current team can cover. We need another product manager who can hold the line across engineering, sales, marketing, and customers without dropping any of them. The bar is high because the people already doing this work set it high.

What We're Building

Traefik Labs builds the connectivity layer for modern infrastructure. It started with Traefik Proxy, the OSS gateway most teams meet first. On top of that sits Traefik Hub: an enterprise API Gateway with security and governance, plus full API Management with developer portals, versioning, and lifecycle controls, all driven by GitOps.

The newer work is where the pressure is highest. AI Gateway puts guardrails and observability in front of LLM traffic. MCP Gateway governs how AI agents reach the tools and servers they call. We ship air-gapped deployments for regulated environments and zero-egress operations for teams that can't send anything outside their own walls. Global enterprises are deploying it right now, and they expect it to hold.

If you want to see how we think rather than how we market, read our blog.

The Role

You'll join the product team as a peer to other product managers. We split the surface area, each of us owns a slice outright, and we argue hard about the parts that overlap.

A product manager here is closer to an individual contributor than a coordinator. You'll write the spec and then test the thing you specified. You'll sit in a customer call in the morning, tear down a competitor's gateway in the afternoon, and sketch a mockup that evening because engineering needs to see it before the next standup. The job pulls in several directions at once, on purpose. If that sounds exhausting rather than energizing, this isn't the seat for you.

We're explicit about one thing. We want a strong practitioner: someone who has shipped real things and still gets close to the work. A purely theoretical product leader will be bored here, and an engineer who treats the roadmap as a place to push personal preferences will clash with the team. Ideas win here on their merit, and they can come from anyone.

What You'll Actually Do

Own a slice of the product end-to-end. Decide what gets built and why, write the feature specs, then verify the result against real environments, the way a user would actually hit it.
Do competitive research with your hands. Stand up the competitor's product, push it until it falls apart, and write down what's actually true. We would rather name a real gap in our own product than invent one in theirs.
Build and break things yourself. Set up a Kubernetes cluster, deploy and configure the gateway, and reproduce what a customer is hitting. A working prototype beats three paragraphs when you're aligning with engineering.
Write for practitioners. Blog posts, webinar content, and partner material that an infrastructure engineer would actually finish reading. Marketing will pull you into this work, and you should want to go.
Talk to customers directly. Discovery calls, POC check-ins, roadmap conversations. You'll hear the edge cases that challenge our assumptions, and your job is to carry them back into the roadmap where they can make a difference.
Shape the roadmap with evidence. Bring the customer signal, the competitive reality, and the technical constraints into the same room, then help decide what's worth doing next.
Run engineering workshops and review docs. Sit with engineers on design decisions. Read the documentation before it ships and flag any deviations from how the product actually behaves.
Travel for work that needs a room. Conferences, partner sessions, and a handful of trips across the year.

How We Expect You to Use AI

We use AI heavily, and we have a rule about it. You control the AI, it does not control you. Use it to move faster on research, drafts, and analysis. Never ship its output without verifying it yourself. We have lost enough hours to confident wrong answers to know the difference between a tool and a crutch. We want a product manager who uses AI effectively and takes ownership of the result. Forwarding whatever the model said, unchecked, is a risk we screen against.

Who Won't Succeed Here

Let's be direct about what doesn't work:

People who spec but won't build. If you can write a beautiful PRD but can't deploy to Kubernetes or read YAML, you'll stall in the first week.
The 9-to-5 fit. This is not a clock-in role. We're looking for someone who lives a little with the product, who thinks about it in the shower and tinkers with it on a Sunday because they want to.
Engineers who use the roadmap to win arguments. Strong technical opinions are welcome. Bring the user and market cases with you, because an opinion without that backing won't move the roadmap here.
Anyone who needs a finished playbook. The AI gateway space is being defined as we build it. You'll be drawing parts of the map yourself, in territory no one has fully charted.
People who take AI output on faith. If "the model said so" is your evidence, we'll find out fast.
The single-lane specialist. One hour it's MCP agent governance, the next it's a blog draft, then a competitive teardown. Context switching is the job itself, and it rarely lets up.

Who Will Thrive

Non-Negotiable Requirements

A real technical background. You may never have carried the PM title, and that's fine. We expect you've earned equivalent ground as a startup CTO, product owner, architect, lead or senior developer, or a project manager who lived close to the build.
Hands-on Kubernetes, well past "familiar with." You can create a cluster, deploy workloads, debug ingress and RBAC, and reason clearly about what's happening when things misbehave.
Extreme ownership. When something is broken or unclear, you take it on, find the roadblock, and remove it yourself.
Honest feedback, both directions. You give it straight and constructively, and you take it without flinching. No politics, no passive aggression. We hold each other to a high bar and expect you to hold us to it too.
A feel for Day 2. You judge a feature by what it's like to live with once the demo is over. Platform teams are the people who run this in production at 2 am, and we want them to love working with the product so much that they become our champions. If your specs stop at "it works" and skip "it's a pleasure to operate," that's a gap.
Customer instinct. You work backward from the user's context and keep their perspective in mind while the rest of the company pulls you elsewhere.

Strong Bonus Points

You already know Traefik, ideally because you run it. A homelab with Traefik in front of your own services tells us more than any certification.
You understand the API landscape. Gateways, management, governance, the patterns, and the tradeoffs between them.
Experience with AI or LLM infrastructure, agents, or MCP.
Familiarity with air-gapped or regulated environments.
A track record of writing what practitioners actually read, or of speaking at community events.
Comfort with GitOps, Helm, and IaC, and the architecture enterprises actually deploy software.

How We Work

We run on these, and they show up in how we make decisions:

Ideas and Facts Compete. Not People & Politics. We debate from first principles, and the best argument wins regardless of who raised it.
High End-User and Market Quotient. We work backward from the customer and put in real effort to understand their context.
Play Chess. Not Checkers. We make bold, strategic moves that earn us leverage and compounding advantages.
Extreme Ownership, becoming a High-Agency Mindset. We get the job done and clear our own roadblocks along the way.
Radical Candor. No Bullying. No Passive Aggressiveness. Honest feedback, mutual respect, and a high bar held consistently.

If reading these made you nod, good. If it made you wince, this probably isn't the place.

Why This Opportunity Is Special

You help define the connectivity layer for AI while it's still being defined. AI Gateway, MCP Gateway, agent governance. These are open questions in the industry right now, and you'd be shaping the answers.
Massive OSS reach. More than 3.5 billion downloads and 63K GitHub stars. Many of the people you build for already run Traefik and just need to see what the enterprise layer adds.
Real influence on a small team. Thirty people. Your decisions reach production fast, with no committee sitting between you and the impact.
A product team that argues well. You'll work with PMs who hold the bar high and expect you to push back when you're right.
A genuine connection to the practitioner's roots. We care about the engineers and “homelabbers” who made Traefik what it is, and the PM has a direct hand in keeping that bond honest.

Compensation and Logistics

Competitive base salary and meaningful equity in a company with real fundamentals and real growth.
Full benefits.
Remote-first. We lean toward candidates who align with European working hours, since much of the product and engineering team is based in the EU.
The team meets in person regularly, and the role involves travel to conferences, partners, and the occasional customer site. Expect a handful of trips across the year.

If you've been doing this work without the title, and the idea of owning a piece of the future of networking and AI sounds like the best kind of hard, let's talk.