Product Lead, Data Center

Meter
San Francisco, CA
Hybrid

Who this role is best for

A natural match if you have hands-on experience with data center networking firmware or software and a track record of cross-functional collaboration.

Best fit for

  • Candidates with firmware/software experience in data center networking and a strong industry reputation
    — “You've built and shipped the firmware or software side of a data center networking platform”
  • Individuals who can align engineering teams without formal authority
    — “You bring engineering teams into alignment without needing formal authority”
  • People who prefer hands-on technical work over abstract planning
    — “You'd rather be in the firmware repo or an incident channel with an engineer than in endless planning meetings”

Things to consider

  • This role requires deep technical engagement with firmware and software teams, not just product management.
    — “Work directly in the weeds with firmware and backend engineers on control plane design”
  • The position demands a strong understanding of hardware tradeoffs, even if not a hardware expert.
    — “You know enough hardware to have an informed opinion — ASIC capabilities, port speed, power and thermal limits”

How to stand out

  • Highlight experience in control plane design and observability in your resume and interviews.
    — “control plane design, API design, and observability”
  • Emphasize your ability to collaborate with hardware, firmware, and software leads as peers.
    — “Hardware, firmware, and software leads treat you as a peer, not a checkpoint”
  • Showcase your engagement with data center networking research and its practical application.
    — “Staying current on data center networking research and bringing it back to Meter's engineering teams”
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · MediumDecision Impact · Company

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • define how Meter builds and sells its first data center switching line
  • work directly with firmware and backend engineers
  • help build the hiring plan for the engineering team
  • talk to prospective data center customers
Typical background
product managementengineering

Skills & requirements

Required

Product ManagementTechnical LeadershipMarket ResearchEngineering CollaborationProduct VisionMarket DirectionTechnical Design

Preferred

Data Center Networking ResearchHardware Expertise

Stack & domain

Product ManagementData Center NetworkingHardwareFirmwareSoftwareControl Plane DesignAPI DesignObservabilityEngineering Team ManagementCustomer CommunicationMarket ResearchAutomationPricingAccountabilityOperational ResponseDebuggingIncidentsHardware TradeoffsASIC CapabilitiesPort SpeedPower And Thermal LimitsNetworking ResearchEngineering AlignmentLeadershipCollaborationCommunicationProblem SolvingTeamworkTechnical CommunicationSystem ThinkingSequence Work

About the role

Original posting from Meter via Ashby

You'll define how Meter builds and sells its first data center switching line.

You'll partner directly with our hardware team, who are already building our first top-of-rack and spine switches, and with engineering leadership across firmware and software. This is not a narrow feature-team PM role — you'll set technical and market direction for a business line that doesn't exist yet at Meter.

WHAT WE'RE BUILDING

We're extending Meter's hardware, firmware, and infrastructure platforms to include Ethernet top-of-rack and spine switching. Detailed information on this TOR, spine, and future data center networking products is at meter.com/dc http://meter.com/dc

Paired with Meter's end-to-end delivery model, customers get one accountable operator instead of a stitched-together stack of vendors — the team that designs the hardware also writes the OS, builds the monitoring software, and runs the deployment. Pricing is tied to power consumption, which is how businesses actually buy data center capacity today. Learn more about our approach to automation at meter.ai http://meter.ai.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

In your first 6–12 months, you will:

  • Work directly in the weeds with firmware and backend engineers on control plane design, API design, and observability — reviewing designs, reading code, and debugging alongside them, not just setting direction from a roadmap doc.
  • Weigh in on hardware tradeoffs when they intersect with software (port density, thermal limits affecting firmware behavior), leaning on our hardware team's expertise rather than owning that judgment yourself.
  • Help build the hiring plan and start assembling the engineering team responsible for the control plane, APIs, optics, and observability these switches depend on.
  • Talking to prospective data center customers — enterprises standing up GPU clusters, not hyperscalers — about what they actually need and where the market is underserved.
  • Staying current on data center networking research and bringing it back to Meter's engineering teams before it becomes a problem they hit blind.

WHERE THIS ROLE CAN TAKE YOU

As Meter's Data Center line grows past its first TOR and spine switches, this role grows into leading a larger product and engineering organization for the business — the same trajectory our switching and firewall product lines are on today.

WHO YOU ARE

  • You've built and shipped the firmware or software side of a data center networking platform, ideally as an engineer earlier in your career, and you've seen how control plane design, API design, and observability decisions play out in real deployments — not just in a spec.
  • You know enough hardware to have an informed opinion — ASIC capabilities, port speed, power and thermal limits — but you're not trying to out-argue the hardware team on their own turf. You'll lean on them and learn the rest on the job.
  • You'd rather be in the firmware repo or an incident channel with an engineer than in endless planning meetings. Low ego and you’ll roll up your sleeves to win.
  • You bring engineering teams into alignment without needing formal authority. Hardware, firmware, and software leads treat you as a peer, not a checkpoint — and they trust what you tell them.
  • You think in systems and sequence work in the right order, so the team isn't relearning the same lesson twice.
  • You're known in the data center networking community — people you'd want to hire will recognize your name, and you're ambitious enough to want to scale something with them.

WHY METER

The internet runs the world. Every purchase you make, video call you join — it's all packets flowing through networks. But those networks haven't changed for decades. They're brittle, complex, and surprisingly hard to set up in an enterprise space.

We started Meter to build better networks. We had to build everything from the ground up: designing and building our own enterprise hardware, intuitive software, and streamlined operations to deliver great outcomes for our customers. Today, we build and deploy these networks at scale. Ambitious companies and enduring institutions like Bridgewater, Lyft, and Reddit rely on Meter to keep their thousands of employees and locations online and productive.

Our bet is simple: We will all use the internet more than we do today. We have the definitive networking stack to enable businesses to do so as seamlessly and reliably as any modern utility.

COMPENSATION

  • The estimated base salary for this role is between $205,000 – $270,000.
  • Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Meter's equity plan.

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Source: Meter careers (Ashby)

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