Senior Product Manager

Overview

Own the search, indexing and query product surface across Capella and Couchbase Enterprise, including SQL++ query, secondary indexing, full-text search, and vector and hybrid search. Hands-on individual contributor role reporting to the VP of AI Product Management.

What you'll do

• Own end-to-end the roadmap, PRFAQs and PRDs, launch, adoption, and post-launch iteration for SQL++ query, global secondary indexes, full-text search, and vector and hybrid search.
• Make Couchbase the retrieval layer for RAG applications and agents: hybrid search relevance, metadata filtering, recall and freshness, and cost per query.
• Improve the developer experience for query and indexing, including writing queries, getting index recommendations, debugging slow plans, and understanding query cost.
• Own the performance, cost and benchmark story for your area, including reproducible benchmarks and a defensible TCO narrative against MongoDB, Elastic, Postgres and pgvector, and dedicated vector stores.
• Work backwards from the customer: write the PRFAQ before code, validate with named enterprise customers, and make clear tradeoff calls on what to build and defer.
• Work shoulder-to-shoulder with query, indexing and search engineering teams and own the PRD as a living document through launch.
• Run design partner programs and build a pipeline of named reference customers.
• Coordinate across Core Database, Capella, Analytics, Mobile and Edge, and the AI Specialist team, including build-vs-partner decisions.
• Equip sales, sales engineering, PMM, and partner GTM with positioning, demos, competitive context, benchmark data and customer proof points.
• Act as product owner in customer briefings, webinars, blog posts, documentation and enablement content, and support analyst engagements.
• Use AI deeply in product management work and contribute to the team's AI-driven PM and AI-DLC practices.
• Contribute to PRFAQ and PRD standards, interview loops and onboarding, and mentor associate and early-career PMs.

What you'll need

• Seven or more years in product management, with at least three on a technical platform (database, data infrastructure, search, analytics, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, or AI infrastructure).
• Systems depth: reason about latency, throughput, recall, index structures, query plans, memory and storage tradeoffs, and cost per operation.
• Customer obsession and working-backwards rigor: write PRFAQs before code and distinguish universal ICP needs from noise.
• Engineering credibility: hold your own on architecture, be decisive on scope, and own the why behind tradeoffs.
• Cross-functional trust with sales, GTM and marketing.
• AI-driven PM practice with concrete examples of AI use in research, PRFAQ drafting, customer synthesis, competitive analysis.
• Hands-on experience building with frontier AI models (APIs, code-generation tools, MCP, agent frameworks, developer ecosystems).
• Strong written communication.
• A shipping record of products and features taken from PRFAQ to launch to adoption.
• Ability to work effectively with a distributed organization across India and US time zones.

Nice to have

• Direct experience with query engines, query optimization, secondary indexing, full-text search, vector search, or retrieval and ranking systems.
• Working familiarity with SQL and SQL-like query languages, Lucene-family search stacks (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr), or vector databases.
• Experience at a database, data platform, search, or AI infrastructure company (MongoDB, Snowflake, Databricks, Elastic, Confluent, Redis, Pinecone, AWS, GCP, Azure, or comparable).
• Experience owning a performance, benchmark, or TCO narrative in a competitive market.
• Public presence through blog posts, conference talks, OSS contributions, or analyst-facing work.
• Prior experience mentoring associate or early-career PMs.
• Familiarity with Anthropic's Claude stack is strongly preferred.

Details

• Location: Bangalore, India.
• Work mode: primarily from the Bangalore office, with flexibility for hybrid work.
• Reports to the VP of AI Product Management.
• Prior search, indexing or query product experience is not required.