Principal Product Manager

Couchbase, the operational data platform for AI, is seeking a Principal Product Manager to own a significant area of their AI portfolio. This role involves collaborating with various teams to deliver capabilities that address enterprise needs and drive product strategy in the AI domain.

Responsibilities:

• End-to-end ownership of a meaningful area within the AI portfolio
• Start with the customer and work backwards
• Work shoulder-to-shoulder with engineering
• Run design partner programs for capabilities in your area
• Coordinate across the broader product organization
• Equip sales, sales engineering, PMM, and partner GTM with what they need to win
• Contribute meaningfully as the product owner in analyst engagements
• Use AI deeply and visibly in your own product management work
• Raise the PM bar across the AI team

Requirements:

• Twelve or more years in product management, with at least five on a technical platform — database, data infrastructure, developer tools, or AI infrastructure
• Deep technical fluency in modern AI infrastructure: vector search, embeddings, RAG, agent frameworks, model serving, context engineering, and emerging interoperability standards. You can hold your own with engineering on architecture
• Customer obsession and working-backwards rigor: You start with the customer and work backwards. You write PRFAQs before code. You can tell which feature requests reflect universal ICP needs and which are noise, and you make the call clearly
• Engineering credibility: Engineers want to work with you. You hold your own on architecture, are decisive on scope, and own the why behind every tradeoff
• Cross-functional trust: Sales trusts your roadmap. GTM trusts your enablement. Marketing trusts your narrative. You build durable working relationships outside your own team
• Exemplary AI-driven PM practice: You already use AI heavily in your own PM work — research, PRFAQ drafting, customer synthesis, competitive analysis, roadmap modeling — and you can point to concrete examples. You set an example for the team in what AI-DLC looks like in day-to-day product execution
• Deep frontier-model experience: Advanced, hands-on experience building with frontier AI models — APIs, code-generation tools, MCP, agent frameworks, and modern developer ecosystems. Deep familiarity with Anthropic's Claude stack is strongly preferred
• Strong written communication. Your PRFAQs and PRDs are the artifact the team aligns on, not a chore that follows the work
• A shipping record — products and features you have personally taken from PRFAQ to launch to adoption, ideally including one that opened a new revenue line
• Experience at a database, data platform, or AI infrastructure company (MongoDB, Snowflake, Databricks, Elastic, Confluent, Redis, Pinecone, AWS, GCP, Azure, or comparable)
• Direct experience building or shipping vector search, agent memory, RAG pipelines, model serving, or related AI infrastructure capabilities
• Public presence — blog posts, conference talks, OSS contributions, or analyst-facing work
• Prior experience mentoring or developing other PMs