Product Owner, Innovation Team at CloudLinux

About CloudLinux

CloudLinux builds Imunify360, a security suite protecting millions of websites across the web hosting industry, and CloudLinux OS, the operating system behind a large share of the world's shared hosting. Alongside these established product lines, a small innovation team works to find and prove the next generation of products.

About the Role

We are hiring a Product Owner to lead the innovation team: a small, senior, fully remote squad of engineers that takes new product concepts from idea to a working MVP in customers' hands, then hands proven products to a product line and moves on to the next concept. You will be accountable for the pipeline of ideas, the speed and rigour with which they are tested, and the evidence behind every go / no-go recommendation.

This is a hands-on lead role, not pure people management: roughly 50% discovery and leadership (customer conversations, scoping, prioritisation, coaching, reporting to the CPO) and 50% building (prototypes, spikes, design and code review, demo stands). You will not be the team's only builder, but you must be able to build a credible prototype yourself and hold a technical opinion about every part of it.

You do not need to arrive as an expert in web hosting or security. If you have taken a product from nothing to its first paying customers before, as a founder, an early engineer, or the lead of an incubation team, and you get deep into unfamiliar technical territory fast, we will teach you the market.

What the Team Works On

The innovation team sits across CloudLinux and Imunify and owns the product concepts that do not yet have a home in an established product line. Ideas come from customer conversations, industry events, telemetry across more than 80,000 servers and the CPO's strategy. The team's job is to turn them into something a customer will pay for within a quarter, using AI coding agents throughout.

What You Will Own

Discovery and delivery

• Run the pipeline of product concepts: capture, size and rank ideas with their assumptions written down, and keep the backlog of bets visible to the CPO and leadership.
• Take each funded concept to a working MVP on a fixed timebox, typically one quarter, with a named customer or design partner testing it.
• Define success criteria up front and report against them with real numbers rather than adjectives: usage, conversion, willingness to pay, support load.
• Make the go / no-go call honestly: hand proven products to a product line with a written runbook and roadmap, and capture what was learned from concepts that did not prove out.
• Report status and risk to the CPO weekly; every item carries an owner and a due date.

Prototyping and technical direction

• Choose the fastest credible build for each concept (buy, borrow, open source or write) with the trade-offs made explicit.
• Build prototypes and demo stands yourself where that is the quickest route to evidence; review designs and code on everything the team ships.
• Keep MVPs production-worthy enough to run on real customer servers: packaging, safe rollout, rollback and observability from the first release.
• Work with the architecture group and the product teams so a successful MVP can be adopted without a rewrite.

People

• Lead a small distributed team: 1:1s, goal setting, performance reviews, and career development.
• Hire: define the profile, run technical interviews, onboard, and mentor engineers.
• Set the working agreements that make fast async work possible: written decisions, public-by-default communication, demos over status meetings.

AI-augmented engineering

We evaluate engineers partly on how effectively they work with coding agents, and in the innovation team this is the main lever on speed. As the lead you model and coach it: prompt specificity, review quality on agent-generated code, context provision, iteration and error recovery, and end-to-end task completion. Expect to use agents to build prototypes, generate test corpora and draft customer-facing material.

First 90 Days

• 30 days: Complete 1:1s with every team member and produce a written read on the team's strengths and gaps; review the concepts in flight and the evidence behind each; spend time with sales, support and at least three hosting customers.
• 60 days: Own the concept pipeline and the weekly status; publish success criteria for every active concept; ship at least one prototype or demo yourself.
• 90 days: Present a ranked portfolio of bets for the next two quarters agreed with the CPO, including one go / no-go recommendation backed by customer evidence and a staffing recommendation.

Requirements

Must-haves

• 5+ years as a software engineer, with 2+ years leading a small team (team lead, tech lead with people responsibility, founder or engineering manager) building new products in a product company or startup.
• A track record of taking at least one product from concept to first paying customers, and of stopping one that did not work.
• Strong Linux proficiency at a software engineer level; comfortable building and reviewing code in a modern language (Python, Go, TypeScript) and debugging live systems on the box.
• Practical product discovery skills: customer interviews, assumption mapping, pricing experiments, and reading usage and conversion data yourself rather than via reports.
• Experience mastering a complex technical domain quickly and making credible architectural decisions in it.
• Demonstrated people leadership: 1:1s, performance conversations, hiring, and growing engineers.
• Experience working in an agentic / AI-assisted development workflow.
• Professional proficiency in English, written and spoken.
• Availability to work EU hours.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in the web hosting ecosystem: cPanel/WHM, Plesk, DirectAdmin, or running infrastructure for a hosting provider.
• Background in security products: runtime protection, web application firewalls, malware detection, vulnerability management or patching.
• Experience with freemium or product-led growth models and self-serve billing.
• Familiarity with the Node.js or Python runtimes and their package ecosystems.
• Comfortable presenting to customers and at industry events.

Benefits

• A focus on professional development.
• Interesting and challenging projects.
• Fully remote work with flexible working hours, allowing you to schedule your day and work from any location worldwide.
• Paid 24 days of vacation per year, 10 days of national holidays, and unlimited sick leave.
• Compensation for private medical insurance.
• Co-working and gym/sports reimbursement.
• Budget for education.
• The opportunity to receive a reward for the most innovative idea that the company can patent.