Product Manager, Database

ABOUT WEAVIATE
Weaviate https://weaviate.io/ is an AI startup with open source and creativity at its core. Our AI-native vector database uses machine learning to create meaningful insights from unstructured data in a completely new way. Named one of Forbes’ Top 50 AI startups, and with over a million monthly downloads, Weaviate is quickly growing in popularity with developers and enterprises alike.
Our team members work remotely across the globe with the flexibility to work from anywhere and at any time. Our people experience this as a massive benefit! Operating with a strong sense of ownership and collaboration, our teams prioritize results while empowering each individual to do their best work.
ABOUT THIS ROLE
The Weaviate Database is the open-source engine behind how developers store, search, and work with AI-native data. It’s the foundation that Weaviate Cloud, Query Agent, and Engram are built on. As the product lead, you'll own direction across the full stack: storage and schema, production scale, developer integrations, and search quality. You'll be the connective tissue between engineering and the business, translating customer needs into requirements, sequencing work across teams, and making sure what ships lands well in market.
WHO WE’RE LOOKING FOR
You thrive in technically complex domains and know how to earn the trust of engineers. You care as much about why customers need something as what they're asking for, and you'll push back when the ask doesn't match the underlying problem. You bring structure to ambiguity without creating bureaucracy, and you treat a clear roadmap as a forcing function for good decisions, not a planning ritual.
You're a strong communicator, moving fluidly between customer discovery, cross-team coordination, and GTM partnership. You're aligned with our company values https://weaviate.io/company/about-us#our_company_values and bring a collaborative mindset and a bias toward shipping.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Own Roadmap and Strategy
– Own the Weaviate Database roadmap: prioritize across engineering teams, make tradeoffs explicit, and keep the plan grounded in customer reality
– Partner with Weaviate Cloud teams to ensure the database roadmap surfaces the capabilities they depend on
– Define success metrics for major features and track outcomes post-ship
Build and Scale Weaviate Core
– Drive product direction across schema, storage, filtering, replication, cluster topology, and migrations
– Translate customer and operational pain into clear requirements and sequence dependency-heavy work across releases
Ship Cutting-Edge Capabilities
– Translate applied research outcomes for search quality, compression, and new retrieval modes into shippable features with clear use cases
– Ensure new capabilities are positioned around real customer problems, not just technical novelty
Empower Developer Adoption
– Shape how developers integrate with and build on Weaviate with MCP, client SDKs, and future integrations
– Run ongoing discovery with developers and enterprise customers to reduce time-to-value and bring customer context into engineering
– Partner with GTM to ensure new capabilities ship with the positioning needed to land well
REQUIREMENTS
– 5+ years of product management experience, with at least 2 years on a developer-facing or infrastructure product
– Proven ability to own a complex technical roadmap across multiple workstreams
– Strong written communication skills, both verbal and written
– Experience running customer discovery and translating qualitative signal into product decisions
– Comfortable working in distributed systems or data infrastructure domains
– Track record of cross-functional collaboration across engineering, design, and GTM
NICE-TO-HAVES
– Experience with databases, search infrastructure, or AI/ML developer tooling
– Familiarity with vector search, embeddings, or RAG workflows
– Experience at a developer tools or open source company
– Background working with enterprise customers alongside a self-serve or community motion
WHAT WE OFFER
– 100% remote with flexible work hours.
– Competitive compensation, including paid time off https://weaviate.io/company/playbook/taking-time-off-at-weaviate.
– Budget available to spend on going to conferences, co-working space, home office equipment, etc.
– Work with very experienced and fun team members.
– An atmosphere that encourages learning and personal growth, and that gives you lots of freedom, flexibility, and responsibilities.
– You will work at the forefront of search, ML/AI, and cloud-native technologies - and all of it is open source.
ARE YOU INTERESTED?
Have a look at this page https://weaviate.io/company/careers#interview-process to learn what you can expect from our interview process. Be aware that conducting a background check is part of our onboarding.
If you’re interested in Weaviate and this role, please apply through this vacancy. We’ll be in touch in response to your application. This way, we can ensure you have the best experience while allowing our team to focus on doing their best work.