Principal Product Manager - Virtualization Architect

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud company advancing the way people live and work. They are seeking a Principal Product Manager - Virtualization Architect to lead the strategy and execution of virtualization products, focusing on KVM-based hypervisor technologies and cloud-native infrastructure. The role involves collaborating across teams to optimize product offerings and ensuring alignment with market needs.

Responsibilities:

• Independently leads end-to-end strategy and operational roadmap for one or more KVM-based virtualization products or a broader virtualization platform portfolio, spanning hypervisor core, management APIs, and guest ecosystem
• Defines and drives the virtualization platform value proposition — including performance benchmarks, TCO advantages, and feature differentiation versus VMware, Hyper-V, and other competing hypervisor stacks — to support go-to-market and sales enablement
• Synthesizes market and customer requirements (MRDs) by maintaining deep knowledge of enterprise virtualization use cases: VDI, server consolidation, cloud-native workloads, telco NFV/edge, and HPC virtualization
• Translates KVM/QEMU/libvirt engineering capabilities into customer-facing requirements and product specifications, ensuring technical feasibility and roadmap alignment with upstream open-source communities (e.g., Linux kernel KVM subsystem, QEMU project)
• Guides key stakeholders through all lifecycle phases — from hypervisor feature planning and kernel integration to product launch, sustaining engineering, and platform end-of-life planning
• Collaborates across engineering, supply chain, and marketing to optimize product configuration, SKU design, pricing, and go-to-market strategies for virtualization platform offerings
• Acts as a subject matter authority on KVM virtualization architecture, providing technical direction to internal teams, enabling sales and partner technical communities, and representing the product externally with customers and at industry forums

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in computer science, engineering or related field of study
• 10+ years of experience in product management, engineering, or a related technical role, with significant exposure to virtualization platforms and hypervisor technologies
• Demonstrated hands-on or architectural familiarity with KVM, QEMU, libvirt, and the broader Linux virtualization stack; experience with upstream open-source contribution or community engagement is a strong plus
• Deep technical knowledge of KVM hypervisor architecture, virtual machine lifecycle, vCPU scheduling, memory management (huge pages, NUMA), virtio device emulation, and hardware-assisted virtualization (Intel VT-x/AMD-V, IOMMU)
• Strong understanding of virtualized networking (OVS, macvtap, SR-IOV, DPDK) and storage virtualization (virtio, iSCSI, NVMe-oF, Ceph/RBD) as they apply to KVM guest workloads
• Familiarity with virtualization management and orchestration ecosystems — including libvirt APIs, oVirt, OpenStack Nova, and KubeVirt — and the ability to define product integration requirements across these layers
• Extensive cross-functional leadership skills: ability to drive alignment across engineering, field, and partner organizations on complex, technically ambiguous virtualization platform initiatives
• Strong financial and business acumen, including experience building business cases, defining performance metrics, and analyzing competitive positioning for infrastructure software products
• Ability to provide product-specific technical training and enablement to sales, partners, and customer-facing teams on KVM and virtualization platform capabilities
• Experience engaging with open-source ecosystems and upstream communities (Linux kernel, QEMU, libvirt, oVirt, OpenStack) as a product stakeholder
• MBA or advanced degree in computer science or engineering preferred