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Salary: USD 205,000 - 270,000 / annual
Meter is building the next generation of enterprise networking infrastructure, including Ethernet top-of-rack and spine switches. As Product Lead for Data Center, you'll define the technical and market direction for Meter's first data center switching business line—a role that goes far beyond typical feature-team product management.
You'll partner directly with hardware engineers already building top-of-rack and spine switches, and collaborate with firmware and software engineering leadership to shape both the technical architecture and go-to-market strategy. This is a hands-on role where you'll work in the weeds on control plane design, API architecture, and observability—reviewing designs, reading code, and debugging alongside engineers rather than managing from a distance.
In your first 6–12 months, you will:
- Collaborate deeply with firmware and backend engineers on control plane and API design, actively participating in technical reviews and incident response
- Weigh in on hardware-software tradeoffs (port density, thermal limits, firmware behavior) while respecting the hardware team's core expertise
- Help build the hiring plan and assemble the engineering team for control plane, APIs, optics, and observability
- Engage directly with prospective data center customers—enterprises building GPU clusters—to understand market needs and gaps
- Stay current on data center networking research and bring insights back to engineering teams
As the Data Center line scales, this role will grow into leading a larger product and engineering organization, following the trajectory of Meter's existing switching and firewall product lines.
Meter's differentiation: end-to-end ownership of hardware, firmware, and software, deployed by the same team that built it. Customers get one accountable operator instead of a stitched-together vendor stack. Pricing is tied to power consumption, aligning with how enterprises actually buy data center capacity. Meter already serves ambitious companies like Bridgewater, Lyft, and Reddit.
REQUIREMENTS:
- You have built and shipped the firmware or software side of a data center networking platform, ideally with earlier-career engineering experience, and have seen how control plane design, API design, and observability decisions play out in real deployments
- You understand hardware well enough to have informed opinions on ASIC capabilities, port speed, power and thermal limits, but recognize the hardware team's expertise and will learn on the job
- You prefer hands-on technical work (firmware repos, incident channels) over endless planning meetings; you have low ego and will roll up your sleeves
- You can bring engineering teams into alignment without formal authority; hardware, firmware, and software leads treat you as a peer and trust your judgment
- You think in systems and sequence work in the right order to avoid repeated lessons
- You are known in the data center networking community; people you'd want to hire recognize your name, and you're ambitious about scaling something meaningful
