Lead Product Manager - Access Management

The Opportunity

Every day, a security administrator somewhere decides who can open which door. A new nurse starts on Monday and needs the medication room but not the server closet. A contractor needs the loading dock for three weeks. Someone leaves the company at 5pm and their badge should stop working at 5:01. Multiply that by 200,000 employees across 400 sites, and you have one of the largest and least-solved logistical problems in enterprise software.

Access control is Verkada's second largest business: hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, growing 40 to 60% year over year, with roughly 80 people building in this area. Access management is the pillar that decides whether all of that feels effortless or exhausting.

We are hiring a Lead Product Manager to own it end to end: users, identities, groups, policies, requests, access levels, and visitor access, from the moment an admin expresses intent to the moment a door opens for the right person.

We do this well today. We think it can be dramatically better, through interfaces that make scale feel simple, APIs and integrations that let the system run itself, and agents that let an admin state what they want instead of clicking through configuration. You will own that as a vertical slice: web and mobile, the backend behind them, the configuration we push to door hardware, and the API and agent surfaces we expose. You will work with a dedicated designer, an engineering manager, and a dedicated engineering team.

We are committed to a thriving in-office culture. This role requires you to work onsite at our HQ in San Mateo, CA.

The access model and administrator interfaces: get the core concepts right

• Own users, groups, credentials, access levels, door associations, and schedules. This is the conceptual core of the product, and getting it right is the difference between an admin who trusts the system and one who works around it
• Own the administrative interfaces and experience across web and mobile: bulk operations, search, and review flows that stay fast when a customer has 200,000 users and 10,000 doors
• Own visitor access, including how guests are invited, credentialed, and expired

Provisioning and integrations: let the system run itself

• Own the API and integration surface. Most large customers want access to follow their identity provider and HR system automatically, so joiners, movers, and leavers are handled without anyone touching our UI
• Partner with Verkada's Core team to drive identity integration: SCIM provisioning, SSO, directory sync, and the mapping between an HR record and what a door actually does

Agents and natural language: let admins state intent

• Define how agents fit into access management. An admin should be able to say what they want and have the system propose the configuration that satisfies it
• Define the guardrails. Anything that changes who can open a physical door needs review, attribution, and a clean path to undo
• Build the evaluation framework: accuracy, escalation rate, and how we know a proposed change is safe before it ships to a door

Security posture: surface what looks wrong before it becomes an incident

• Build the proactive layer: over-provisioned users, credentials that outlived their purpose, access patterns that do not match a door's sensitivity
• Own audit and compliance reporting, including what a customer hands an auditor to prove who had access to what, and when

Direction

• Set the direction for access management over multiple years, not just the next few releases, and make the case for it to engineering leadership and the exec team
• Become the person at Verkada who understands access administrators best. You will define the personas and jobs to be done for this area and make that framework something the rest of the org uses
• Raise the bar for the product managers around you. You will work alongside four other PMs in access control, and we expect your standards for research, writing, and decision-making to show up in their work too

How You'll Work

• Own customer discovery. Talk to security administrators directly, go on site walks, and watch someone badge through a building to see where the model breaks down in the real world
• Set strategy and prioritize the roadmap, balancing reliability, new capability, and the loudest customer in the room
• Prototype constantly. We expect you to build things to think, not only to write specs about them. You will do this in the interview process too
• Partner closely with engineering and design, bringing both technical depth and design sense
• Drive execution from spec to launch with obsessive attention to detail
• Craft the product pitch with marketing and sales, and help the field sell a capability that is often the reason a deal closes
• Stay on top of the competitive landscape, the identity ecosystem, and where the market is going
• Hold several time horizons at once: learning from customers now, planning six and twelve months out, and shipping what launches next quarter

What you'll bring

• 6+ years of product management experience, currently at Senior or Lead scope. You have owned a product area, not a single feature, and you set its direction rather than executing someone else's
• Experience with B2B software used by administrators at scale. with a track record of building and scaling complex enterprise products. Permissions, identity, provisioning, policy, or configuration-heavy admin tooling is directly relevant, as is any product where one person's settings decide what thousands of other people can do
• A real design partnership. You write problem briefs rather than solutions, you can say why a design is good and not just whether you like it, and you have changed a designer's mind and had yours changed
• Comfort going deep with engineers on architecture and tradeoffs, then explaining them clearly to customers and executives
• A standing customer cadence you own, not research handed to you. You can point to a time a customer insight reversed a plan you had already made
• Explicit prioritization. You can walk through a real sequencing decision: the criteria you used, what you consciously dropped, and who was unhappy about it
• You enjoy envisioning the big picture and managing the details
• Strong written and verbal communication. You lead with the recommendation, make the tradeoff explicit, and keep it short enough that people actually read it
• You like getting your hands dirty and getting out in the field to understand customer pain points

Employee Benefits

Additional Information:

• We do sponsor and take over sponsorship of employment visas for this role. If we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa.

Estimated Annual Pay Range 185000 - 215000 USD