Sr Product Manager

About the Role

Couchbase is building the operational data platform for AI. We are hiring a Senior Product Manager, AI to own a defined capability area within the AI portfolio across Capella and Couchbase Enterprise. Reporting to the VP of AI Product Management, this Senior PM partners closely with engineering, sales and GTM, marketing, and the broader AI organization to ship capabilities that solve real problems for our enterprise ICP.

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 — at the center of one of the most consequential shifts in enterprise data infrastructure. 

What You Will Own

• Product execution within a defined AI capability area: End-to-end ownership of one or more capabilities inside the AI portfolio. The roadmap in your area, the PRFAQs and PRDs, the launch, the adoption — and the iteration after launch. You contribute to the strategy for the wider portfolio area you sit within, working with the Principal PM and the VP of AI Product Management who set it.
• 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 engineering. 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: Support and 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 the broader product organization — 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: build where Couchbase is uniquely strong, and surface partnerships and integrations where we can deliver a better customer experience faster.
• Sales and GTM partnership: Equip sales, sales engineering, PMM, and partner GTM with what they need to win in the capabilities you own — positioning, demos, competitive context, customer proof points. Be the product owner in deals where the technical depth matters.
• External voice: Contribute as the product owner in customer briefings, webinars, blog posts, documentation, and enablement content for the capabilities you own. Support analyst engagements (Gartner, Forrester, IDC) and keynote content led by the Principal PM, PMM, and AR.
• AI-driven PM practice: Use AI deeply and visibly in your own product management work — research, PRFAQ drafting, customer synthesis, competitive analysis, roadmap modeling, engineering collaboration. Adopt and contribute to the team's AI-driven PM and AI-DLC (AI-driven development lifecycle) practices in day-to-day execution.
• Raising the bar: Share what works. Contribute to PRFAQ and PRD standards, interview loops, and onboarding. Mentor associate and early-career PMs as the team grows.

What You Will Deliver

• PRFAQs and PRDs for the capabilities you own, validated with named enterprise customers before engineering starts.
• Shipped capabilities in your area with measurable adoption and at least one named reference customer per major launch.
• Clear, defensible tradeoff decisions visible to engineering, sales, and GTM. The team knows what is in, what is out, and why.
• Sales and GTM enablement that the field actually uses — measured by pipeline influence and win-rate signals, not enablement-decks-produced.
• Contributions to the broader AI portfolio narrative — customer-facing content, blog posts, and documentation in partnership with the AI Specialist team, PMM, and AR.
• Visible AI-driven PM practice — concrete examples of AI-DLC in your daily work that the rest of the team can learn from.

Must Have

• 7+ years in product management, with at least three on a technical platform — database, data infrastructure, developer tools, or AI infrastructure.
• 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.
• AI-driven PM practice: You already use AI in your own PM work — research, PRFAQ drafting, customer synthesis, competitive analysis, roadmap modeling — and you can point to concrete examples.
• Frontier-model experience: Hands-on experience building with frontier AI models — APIs, code-generation tools, MCP, agent frameworks, and modern developer ecosystems. 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.

Nice to Have

• 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 associate or early-career PMs.