Katarina Sokach, Senior Technical Product Manager, supports our Digital Global Operations team. For almost 14 years, she has deepened her product management, technical, and stakeholder leadership skills as a product manager in the tech space. In this edition of People Spotlight, we interview Katarina about the growth and evolution of her journey at Equinix.
Life as a product manager
Katarina’s main responsibility is to support her development team and “shield them from any noise, so they can concentrate on delivering good, quality software.” She jokes that she “lives” in Jira and spends the majority of her time drafting solid requirements and aligning stakeholders to move her product forward.
“It is very rewarding to see your product coming to light and have real users testing it and using it. This journey would not be possible without having a strong development squad. We are a small family that spends 8 hours a day together, so if we fail, we learn together. If we win, we win together.”
Product managers take on a high level of ownership at Equinix, which makes the experience even more meaningful. “What I absolutely love about Equinix is that you are truly the CEO of your own product,” Katarina says. With the ability to leverage modern best practices and technology stacks, teams are trusted to continuously improve, evolve, and even decommission solutions when needed.
From building centralized data lakes and leading product and data migrations to redesigning existing solutions and transforming manual, spreadsheet-based processes into scalable digital applications, the work is both complex and impactful. “I’ve seen a lot of red tape in the past that I haven’t seen at this company,” she shares, reinforcing the autonomy and trust that define the environment.
The foundation that connects
When people think of Equinix, infrastructure often comes to mind. But for Katarina, Equinix goes deeper. “When I hear Equinix, I hear ‘foundation’,” she says. It’s about returning to the core systems that power the digital world: complex, critical, and often overlooked.
“Equinix delivers a foundation that is used by pretty much every single company that we know. If Equinix is gone tomorrow, we will be back to the Stone Age era.”
While attention tends to focus on Big Tech giants, she points out that many of them rely heavily on Equinix behind the scenes. That unseen impact is what makes the work meaningful, building the stability that underpins everyday digital life.
That same combination of impact and opportunity shows up in the employee experience. “Equinix is a perfect combination of the way cloud providers and startups work,” she explains. Teams are constantly building, learning, and innovating, but they grow with the scale and support of a global leader. On her own journey, she adds, “I’ve done both full-time and also been a contractor for seven years, and I can confidently say that this is one of the best companies that I’ve ever worked for.”
For her, Equinix brings together the best of both worlds: the pace of innovation and the foundation to grow, all at the center of a digital ecosystem the world depends on.
Working across global teams
Collaborating in diverse regions and time zones is part of the rhythm at Equinix. To Katarina, it’s one of the most energizing aspects of her role. Having worked with teams across Poland, Singapore, India, Canada, the United States, Egypt, and Slovakia, her experience shows the impact of global teams coming together to deliver as one. “It is amazing to see that people go above and beyond to build something great for our customers,” she shares.
While working across time zones can be challenging, mutual respect and flexibility make it work. “It’s not always easy, but it’s not that hard either. We just have to be respectful of each other’s time and be accommodating.” Along the way, the human connections matter just as much. “I love that I get to learn about different cultures, share mine, and have a good laugh. It’s made me stronger as a professional,” she adds.
This sense of connection defines her team and the wider culture at Equinix. “I absolutely love my team,” she says. “I feel very lucky to work with top-of-the-top senior technical talent.” Surrounded by hardworking, honest, and focused people who are committed to delivering best-in-class solutions, she finds herself learning something new every day. “There’s no drama—just hard work and good laughs.” For those considering joining, she believes success comes down to mindset. “The people who thrive here are honest, resourceful, and curious, those who are willing to learn and go above and beyond.” Above all, she emphasizes one defining trait: “Honesty is the most valuable.”
Katarina sees this vivid culture beyond her immediate team. It even shows up at the very beginning of the employee experience. She reflects on her onboarding journey: “Having been in the industry for over 14 years, I found that our HR representatives are incredibly supportive, and they genuinely wanted to do their best to help me get settled. I strongly believe that the culture at Equinix plays a big role in this. By the time I went through the first interview, my résumé had already been thoroughly reviewed. I was amazed by how organized, kind and respectful my HR contact was.”
Good managers shorten the path
Extraordinary managers clear the path and create space for their teams to do their best work. Katarina fondly describes how her manager is intentional about reducing noise, saying no and keeping focus. “He always clears the path for the team, so we can concentrate on the goals that were given to us.”
Each team member also retains full autonomy to manage themselves and their calendar. But when the workload gets hard to navigate, their team leader is always ready to step in—from providing coaching to having their backs during presentations. Katarina emphasizes the importance of a manager who prioritizes the team and shares its achievements.
Full-stack growth in action
Through the impact of strong leadership, Katarina has harnessed several opportunities to expand her scope, building her passion for her work.
“I have had the pleasure of working with wonderful managers who truly believed in me and gave me opportunities to grow. One of the opportunities was to create product best practices that can be scaled and leveraged by multiple teams, which led to creating a ‘Product Connect’ series that I’ve led.”
She has also worked on data migration projects, which exposed her to a wide range of technologies, customer use cases, and the process of developing detailed requirements. These experiences deepened her understanding of how products come together from end to end. “I was also exposed to multiple application portfolios, which re-ignited my love for coding.”
As her passion grows, she has ultimately found herself drawn back to what she considers closest to her core: “infrastructure and backend.” At Equinix, Katarina leads a critical initiative in infrastructure monitoring, building a centralized hub for telemetry data management. This work provides visibility into the day-to-day operations of data center site teams, enabling her to create solutions that are both practical and impactful.
At the same time, she wields the freedom to think creatively and push boundaries. As she puts it, she can “build a strong foundation for customers but also use my wildest imagination to improve their experience using technology.”
With hands-on exposure to a wide range of technologies across the stack, she strengthens both her technical depth and product perspective. “I was exposed to GCP features—Cloud Composer, Airflow jobs, BigQuery, and observability on the data lake side,” alongside experience with databases such as Oracle and Postgres.
On the application side, she has worked with modern front-end frameworks such as React, TypeScript, Node.js, single-spa, and styled-components—supported by tools such as Jest and Webpack—as well as back-end development tools such as Spring and Maven. Additionally, she has leveraged design systems, such as Quix components, to ensure consistency in the user experience.
Building on this foundation, she is now exploring the next wave of innovation. “Currently, I am also learning and implementing a lot of AI-related technologies, especially Claude and Gemini, to support our company’s AI-first objectives,” she adds.
Product management at Equinix—built on trust and ownership
At Equinix, autonomy is more than a concept. It’s part of the culture. Within her team, that trust comes with a distinctive edge. Surrounded by highly experienced technologists, she describes it as a place built for those who want to create and continuously grow. “I’ve been lucky to work with teams like this before, but what stands out here is that we actually deliver software, not just paper ideas.”
This mindset shows up as ideas are empowered to move quickly. When she was initially tasked with building a simple Excel upload feature, she saw an opportunity to expand on it. “I wanted to introduce AI-driven data validation to improve data accuracy,” she explains. With her manager’s support, she turned that idea into a proof of concept within just two weeks. It has since evolved into a live, production-ready feature.
For her, that experience captures what makes Equinix different: the freedom to think bigger, act faster, and turn ideas into real impact. For those considering the opportunity, her advice is simple and direct: “Go after your dreams. Your dream is on the other side of fear. Our journey is short, and we should not be afraid to do what we want. It is only up to us to define our journey. But if you want to work with Top talent, if you are hungry and want to learn a lot, if you want to be able to make decisions, build great foundational products, and have all the freedom you want to innovate, you have to join Equinix.”
If you want to build real products, work with strong engineering teams, and have the autonomy to take ideas to production, Equinix is the place to do it. Find open roles where you can make an impact.
Check out software engineering and product management roles here.
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