Principal Product Manager, FOCUS
FinOps Foundation, Linux Foundation
The FinOps Foundation is hiring a Principal Product Manager to define the product strategy, ecosystem-level roadmap, and future vision for FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification). You will lead cross-organizational initiatives and drive product outcomes that impact the broader open source ecosystem.
Full-time contract or employee role. Fully remote. US, SA, and EU time zones preferred. Travel several times a year.
What You Will Do
Product Strategy, Roadmapping & Execution
Lead Ecosystem Strategy: Define product architecture and strategy in partnership with internal technical staff and working group maintainers. Anticipate market shifts, align long-term vision, and set standards for product excellence across the FinOps ecosystem.
Orchestrate High-Impact Releases: Structure multi-year roadmaps and execution plans that de-risk complexity, cross team boundaries, and align to goals across the Linux Foundation Tech Value Umbrella (FinOps Foundation, Tokenomics Foundation, and the ITAM Forum). Build highly defensible release plans backed by strategic KPIs, capacity metrics, and deep evidence.
Govern the Backlog: Tackle strategically important problems at the organizational level. Evolve day-to-day backlog triage into scalable frameworks for prioritization, carefully balancing community support, estimates of working group activities, and ecosystem value.
Drive AI Innovations: Craft feature requests defining how the FOCUS specification could represent complex, emerging charges for AI services, resolving deep technical tradeoffs and system-level implications.
Ecosystem Leadership & Stakeholder Management
Influence the Industry: Communicate a compelling product vision across executive, engineering, design, and community audiences. Actively evangelize FOCUS and open source product thinking internally and externally.
Manage Complex Relationships: Build alignment and resolve conflicts among C-level executives, cloud providers, SaaS vendors, data generators, and practitioners who often represent competing organizations.
Drive Community Insight: Introduce scalable, systemic approaches to discovery and validation. Partner with the community team to shape activities that gather definitive data and test market assumptions. Connect ecosystem trends with product direction.
Force Multiplier: Act as a mentor and leader across the Foundation, guiding product prioritization across competing needs and aligning efforts to foundation-wide objectives.
Industry Standardization & Operational Excellence
Scale Conformance Certification: Orchestrate and evaluate the FOCUS conformance certification program. Introduce processes, tooling, and workflows that eliminate inefficiencies, enabling the program to scale seamlessly at an industry level.
Elevate Training & Support: Contribute visionary updates to the FOCUS training program and oversee education implementation, ensuring scalable knowledge sharing and design maturity growth across the Foundation.
Technical Stewardship & Product Experience
Own the Information Architecture: Connect disparate systems into coherent user journeys. Oversee the FOCUS website's architecture, specification content, and use case library.
Translate Technical Complexity: Align the use case library with the specification's example SQL. Analyze coverage gaps and translate highly complex technical systems into pragmatic, systemic solutions.
Active Working Group Contribution: Participate as an elite contributor, driving modular design thinking. Review complex pull requests and issues on GitHub, track specification content to merge, and orchestrate work spanning multiple technical domains.
What You Bring
Education & Experience: BS/BA degree and 10–15 years of relevant product or technical experience; recognized leader in product strategy and execution, capable of bringing clarity to chaos under pressure
Domain Expertise: Domain expert in cloud billing data, enterprise platforms, and FinOps; deep understanding of how practitioners use data, where it falls short, and how data generators implement specifications
Strategic & Technical Fluency: Proven ability to translate highly complex technical challenges into broadly leverageable solutions; deep understanding of how AI services are charged (experience mapping these to FOCUS is a plus)
Communication & Facilitation: Masterful communicator capable of aligning diverse, competing organizations; clear, executive-level writing and presentation skills
Tooling Proficiency: Advanced fluency in GitHub (or ability to scale deeply into it quickly), advanced SQL, and information architecture; fluent, responsible use of AI assistants in line with the FOCUS AI Usage Guidelines
Operational Excellence: Exemplary organizational skills with a proven track record of managing multi-stakeholder initiatives and running or simplifying complex certification, audit, or compliance programs
Open Source Leadership: Strong background in open source strategy and cross-functional collaborative environments
About FOCUS
FOCUS (the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) is an open specification that normalizes cost and usage data across technology providers, so practitioners can report on and act on it in one format. It is an independent specification project under the Joint Development Foundation. The FinOps Foundation supports it, and it is open to input from other Linux Foundation bodies, including the Tokenomics Foundation and the ITAM Forum. Contributors from cloud providers, SaaS vendors, tool vendors, and practitioner organizations develop the specification in the open on GitHub.
About the FinOps Foundation
The FinOps Foundation is a Linux Foundation program dedicated to advancing cloud financial management through best practices, education, and standards. With 96,000+ practitioners globally, the Foundation develops the FinOps Framework and FOCUS specification while serving a vibrant community of cloud professionals.
Additional Information
Salary $225,000 - $260,000 USD
The Linux Foundation is unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position. Candidates must be authorized to work in their country of residence without employer sponsorship, now or in the future.
All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.
BS/BA degree and 10-15 years product/technical experience; domain expert in cloud billing data, enterprise platforms, FinOps; advanced GitHub, SQL, information architecture; executive communication; open source leadership; authorized to work without sponsorship.
Key Responsibilities
- defining product strategy
- managing ecosystem roadmap
- leading cross-organizational initiatives
Skills & Tools
GitHub, SQL
Job Details
- Category: Product Management
- Seniority: Senior Level
- Commitment: Full Time, Contract
- Workplace: Remote — United States or South America or Europe
- Salary: USD 225,000 – 260,000 / year
- Languages: English
About The Linux Foundation
A neutral, trusted hub for developers and organizations to code, manage, and scale open technology projects and ecosystems. — Industry: Information Technology