Senior Product Manager, Cluster Scalability
Location: Dublin
About the Role
MongoDB is hiring a Senior Product Manager to own scalability for the Atlas data platform. Atlas is how the world’s most demanding applications run on MongoDB — from real-time gaming and financial transactions to AI workloads with unpredictable traffic patterns. When those applications grow, slow down, spike, or contract, scalability is the layer that decides whether the customer trusts us to keep running their business.
This role owns the end-to-end product experience for how customers scale up, scale down, and horizontally scale their Atlas deployments. That includes vertical scaling (instance tier changes), autoscaling, horizontal scaling (sharding and shard key strategy), and the operational workflows around all of them. You will set the strategy, drive execution with engineering, and be accountable for measurable year-over-year improvements in how reliably and predictably customers scale.
We care less about whether you’ve worked on databases before and more about whether you’re the kind of PM who can ramp fast on a hard technical domain, form a clear opinion about what needs to happen, and defend that opinion to senior engineers, field partners, and enterprise CTOs, especially when they disagree with you. Database and scaling concepts are teachable. Judgment, conviction, and crispness are not.
Responsibilities
- Set a clear, opinionated vision and strategy for Atlas cluster scalability and translate it into concrete, prioritized bets each release.
- Own the end-to-end roadmap for vertical scaling, autoscaling, and horizontal scaling, including the operational and observability surfaces customers rely on during scaling events.
- Make hard prioritization calls, including saying no to things with real customer or leadership support, and own those decisions and their consequences.
- Build deep technical understanding of Atlas scaling internals (instance tier mechanics, autoscaler logic, sharding, balancer behavior, capacity headroom) and use it to shape requirements and tradeoffs with engineering. You don’t need to know this on day one. You do need to know it deeply by month two.
- Represent product direction with conviction to senior engineering leaders, field partners, and enterprise customers, especially when they disagree.
- Stay close to customers and field partners to deeply understand scaling pain points, failure patterns, and the moments where trust is won or lost.
- Define success metrics for scalability, build analytics that surface issues early, and use data to inform clear, timely decisions under ambiguity.
- Lead proactive, cross-functional execution with Engineering, Design, Docs, Support, Marketing, and Sales to ship reliable, high-quality scaling experiences and accelerate adoption.
- Mentor junior PMs, contribute to strategic product thinking across teams, and influence leadership-level product decisions, all while operating without direct reports.
- Be accountable to year-over-year growth on the metrics that matter for Atlas scalability.
Requirements
Required qualifications
- 5+ years of product management experience on technically complex, infrastructure-level products. Database, distributed systems, or cloud infrastructure experience is a plus but not required. We care about your ability to ramp fast on hard technical domains and make sound product decisions once you do.
- Demonstrated success owning enterprise-grade, technical products end-to-end — not just shipping them, but delivering measurable customer and business outcomes you can quantify.
- Technical fluency: comfortable discussing architecture, failure modes, performance characteristics, and tradeoffs with senior engineers, and connecting technical decisions directly to customer outcomes. You don’t need to know what an autoscaler does on day one. You do need to be the kind of PM who will understand it deeply within your first month and have an opinion about how it affects the customer experience by month two.
- Track record of taking products from 0 to 1 and from 1 to 50 — building something new and scaling what works.
- Strong customer-orientation and field-connection, regularly engaging directly with customers and field teams and translating their input into clear requirements and roadmap decisions.
- Excellent written and verbal communication: crisp, high-quality artifacts and the ability to tailor the message by audience (engineering, executives, customers, field). In this role you will represent product direction to enterprise CTOs and to senior engineering leaders who may disagree with your priorities. You need to hold the room.
- Strong analytical skills and metrics rigor, including defining success metrics, instrumenting and debugging analytics, and using data to inform (but not replace) judgment.
- Demonstrated decision-making speed and conviction under ambiguity, with specific examples of making hard calls, cutting scope, and holding a position under pushback. We will ask you about this in the interview, and we will push back on your answer.
- Desire to be a part of the Go-to-Market, Marketing, and Sales enablement process.
Nice to have
- Hands-on experience with databases, distributed systems, or cloud infrastructure platforms (compute, storage, networking, capacity planning).
- Prior product ownership of developer tools, infrastructure platforms, or mission-critical SaaS used by enterprise customers.
- Experience with autoscaling, capacity planning, sharding, or similar elasticity problems in any domain.
