Principal Product Marketing Manager: Java Intelligence

What You'll Do (aka Responsibilities)

You will be responsible for specific areas across Azul Intelligence Cloud, Azul Optimizer Hub, and Payara InSight, working closely with other product managers and cross-functional partners. You will help shape product strategy, roadmap priorities, pricing and packaging, market positioning, and business performance for your areas. You’ll use customer insight, market data, and business results to recommend direction, build alignment, and drive decisions across product, engineering, sales, and marketing.

The balance of your focus across the three products will evolve as business priorities change. These products are also closely connected to Azul’s Java runtimes: Optimizer Hub ships as part of Azul Prime, while Intelligence Cloud’s JVM Inventory supports Azul Core Oracle migration initiatives. Your work will therefore influence broader product and runtime priorities, and at times may include direct involvement with Azul Core and Azul Prime.

This is an individual contributor role with no direct reports. Success will come through strong product judgment, clarity, data-driven decision making, collaboration, and the ability to influence teams and senior leaders.

Responsibilities:

Drive business and product outcomes.

• Define meaningful measures of success for your product areas and use them to guide priorities and decisions. Monitor sales, pipeline, pilot-to-production conversion, adoption, retention, and other relevant product and business metrics. Partner with sales, marketing, engineering, and leadership to understand performance, identify opportunities or risks, and adjust product direction when the data or customer feedback indicates a change is needed.

Shape product strategy.

• Develop and recommend the multi-year direction for your areas, including where the products can differentiate, which customer segments and use cases to prioritize, and where Azul should build, partner, or integrate. Ensure your recommendations reflect customer needs, market dynamics, competitive intelligence, technical considerations, and Azul’s broader enterprise and open-source portfolio.

Partner with executive leadership.

• Report to the VP of Product Management and work closely with the CPO, CEO, CRO, CTO, and other senior leaders. Present product strategies, roadmap recommendations, pricing considerations, customer insights, and business results clearly and credibly. Use evidence to support recommendations, invite constructive challenge, and adapt direction as new information emerges.

Translate strategy into roadmap priorities.

• Turn product strategy into clear, sequenced, and achievable roadmap recommendations. Evaluate priorities and trade-offs across products and initiatives, build alignment with engineering, sales, and marketing, and help teams understand both what is being prioritized and why. Communicate roadmap direction effectively to internal stakeholders and customers while balancing customer needs, business opportunity, technical feasibility, and speed of execution.

Develop pricing and packaging recommendations.

• Help shape how Intelligence Cloud is priced, packaged, and metered across Java environments of varying sizes and complexity, how Optimizer Hub is positioned and packaged as part of Azul Prime, and how Payara InSight is packaged for Azul Payara customers. Develop and test pricing models, gather feedback from customers and the field, and partner with finance, sales, and leadership to refine and implement recommendations.

Lead inbound product management activities.

• Partner closely with engineering throughout the product development lifecycle, from requirements and design reviews through implementation decisions and release readiness. Lead customer discovery and requirements sessions, translate customer problems into clear product needs, and provide direction on UX and UI priorities. For areas involving Optimizer Hub, consider the operator experience of installing, sizing, and running the product on Kubernetes. Contribute to customer-facing technical documentation and knowledge-base content, deliver compelling product demonstrations, and continually evaluate the usability of the product.

Lead outbound product management activities.

• Partner with marketing on positioning, product launches, sales enablement, competitive differentiation, and customer-facing content. Participate in customer and prospect conversations, support strategic deals and escalations, and conduct ongoing market and competitive research. Help ensure product messaging resonates with developers, platform teams, technical decision-makers, and executive buyers.
Build technical credibility.
• Develop a strong working understanding of the technologies behind the products and engage effectively with engineering teams on product and technical trade-offs. You do not need to be a JVM internals expert, but you should understand JVM architecture and operating principles, including JIT compilation and warm-up, well enough to have substantive conversations with engineering and translate technical capabilities into meaningful customer and business value.

What you bring (aka Experience, Skills)

• 8+ years experience in product management, including several years owning a product or product line end to end — strategy through launch through revenue.
• Track record shipping enterprise SaaS in an adjacent market: application performance monitoring, application security, observability, optimization, systems management, or log analytics.
• Fluency with AI tools and experience operating in an AI-first product management organization — you use them in your daily product work and have a view on where they help and where they don't.
• Deep technical fluency generally — you can read an architecture diagram, follow an engineering debate, and ask the question that changes the answer.
• Demonstrated ownership of pricing and packaging for a technical product, including the messy cross-functional work of getting a model approved and into market.
• Understanding of DevOps engineers, platform engineers, and developers as the key influencers in an enterprise sales cycle.
• Strong domain knowledge of public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) and Kubernetes.
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English — equally effective with an engineer and with a Fortune 100 CIO.
• Comfortable in a fully remote, async, multi-time-zone setup: self-directed, and a strong writer because writing is how decisions get made here.
• Comfortable in a startup-shaped environment where bringing order to chaos is part of the job.

Nice to have

• Hands-on software or quality engineering background — you have written code and debugged production systems.
• Experience with open source communities.
• Familiarity with cloud cost optimization: how compute is provisioned, monitored, and optimized.
• Experience taking a new product from early traction to a durable revenue line.
• Working knowledge of Java and Java development tooling.
• Familiarity with Jakarta EE application servers (Payara, WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss) and OpenTelemetry.
• Experience working across more than one product at once, especially products at different stages or sold through different motions.
• Experience with infrastructure software that customers deploy and operate themselves, not just SaaS.