Senior Product Manager

About the role

What you'll do

• Couchbase is building the operational data platform for AI. Search, indexing and query are the core of it — how data is found, filtered, ranked and returned is what determines whether an application, or an agent, can actually use the data underneath. We are hiring a Senior Product Manager to own that surface area across Capella and Couchbase Enterprise: the SQL++ query experience, secondary indexing, full-text search, and vector and hybrid search.
• This is a hands-on individual contributor role for someone who wants to do the work at the Senior level — write the PRFAQ, sit with the customer, push the tradeoff, ship the capability, and own the outcome after launch. Reporting to the VP of AI Product Management, you will partner closely with the query, indexing and search engineering teams, with sales and GTM, and with the broader AI organization.
• You do not need to have shipped a query engine or a search product before. We are hiring for the underlying capability, not the resume line — see “Who This Role Is Open To” below.
• What You Will Own
• Search, indexing and query as a product surface: End-to-end ownership of how customers express and satisfy a query on Couchbase — SQL++ query, global secondary indexes, full-text search, and vector and hybrid search. The roadmap in your area, the PRFAQs and PRDs, the launch, the adoption, and the iteration after launch.
• Retrieval for AI applications: Make Couchbase the retrieval layer that RAG applications and agents actually use — hybrid search relevance, metadata filtering, recall and freshness, and cost per query. Work with the wider AI portfolio so retrieval composes with the rest of the platform rather than sitting beside it.
• Developer experience for query and indexing: How a developer writes a query, gets an index recommendation, debugs a slow plan, and understands what a query costs. Reduce the number of things a developer has to know before their first query is fast.
• Performance, cost and benchmark credibility: Own the performance story for your area. Reproducible benchmarks the field can stand behind, a defensible cost and TCO narrative against MongoDB, Elastic, Postgres and pgvector, and dedicated vector stores, and a clear point of view on where Couchbase wins and where it does not.
• Working backwards from the customer: Start with the customer and work backwards. Write the PRFAQ before any code is written. Validate with real, named enterprise customers. Make clear tradeoff calls about what to build and what to defer based on what the enterprise ICP universally needs — not features chasing competitors or one-off requests outside the ICP.
• Engineering partnership: Work shoulder-to-shoulder with the query, indexing and search engineering teams. Earn their trust by being technically credible, decisive on scope, and clear on the why. Own the PRD as a living document, not a one-time artifact. Hold the bar on quality, scope, and timing through to launch.
• Customer and design partner engagement: Run design partner programs for the capabilities you own. Bring real customer voice into roadmap decisions and back to the broader team. Help build a pipeline of named reference customers willing to talk publicly about what they have shipped.
• Cross-portfolio collaboration: Coordinate across Core Database, Capella, Analytics, Mobile and Edge, and the AI Specialist team so the capabilities you own compose cleanly with the rest of the platform. Bring a build-vs-partner point of view to your area.

What you'll bring

• 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. You can reason about latency, throughput, recall, index structures, query plans, memory and storage tradeoffs, and cost per operation. Given a benchmark or a slow query, you know what to ask next.
• 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.
• AI-driven PM practice: You already use AI in your own PM work — research, PRFAQ drafting, customer synthesis, competitive analysis — and you can point to concrete examples.
• Frontier-model experie