Director of Product

Job description

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 Weaviate has been really successful in enterprise, and we're doubling down on that by growing our enterprise-facing teams. That shifts what the product has to do. Large customers arrive with specific requirements, and someone has to decide which of those we build, in what order, and which ones we tell the customer we won't build. As Director of Product, you'll own product strategy and decision-making across the Weaviate Database, Weaviate Cloud, and our agent products. You'll spend a lot of your week with customers, and the rest of it turning what you heard into a roadmap that engineering can act on. You'll work directly with our CTO on vision and with tech leads on what's actually feasible. This is a player-coach role. You'll manage a small product team, likely one to three PMs over time, while continuing to own product areas yourself. WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR You're comfortable in front of enterprise customers, and you go looking for those conversations rather than waiting for them to be scheduled. You can tell the difference between a request that will block a deal and a request that's a minor annoyance, and you can explain how you reached that conclusion. You make prioritization decisions using evidence. When you say one feature should ship before another, you can clearly explain the business impact and tradeoffs behind that decision, and you're comfortable defending it. You have a real working relationship with engineering. You understand that adding something to the plan means something else moves, and you're upfront about those tradeoffs. You take tech debt seriously when engineers make the case for it. You spend enough time with the teams that trust is already there when a hard conversation comes up. You're senior enough to hold your ground. Priorities will get pulled in different directions by big opportunities, and part of your job is deciding when that's the right call and when to push back. RESPONSIBILITIES TRANSLATE CUSTOMER REALITY INTO A ROADMAP - Run a continuous rhythm of customer conversations: discovery calls, renewals, and support signal - Turn enterprise requirements into clear specs engineering can build from, with the underlying problem attached, so the team can make good calls without you in the room - Maintain one prioritized roadmap that shows what's shipping, what got moved to make room, and why OWN PRIORITIZATION AND BUSINESS VALUE - Attach an expected business impact to significant roadmap items so tradeoffs can be argued with evidence - Assess incoming enterprise requests for criticality and pattern: is this one customer, or the first of many - Manage expectations across sales, leadership, and customers when priorities change - Define success metrics for major features and follow up on them after they ship WORK CLOSELY WITH ENGINEERING - Partner with tech leads on sequencing, feasibility, and dependency-heavy work across releases - Make the cost of a change in direction explicit before it lands on a team - Give engineering enough context on customer problems that they can push back with better ideas - Keep the balance between customer-driven work and the reliability and platform work engineering needs to do SET THE OPERATING STANDARD FOR PRODUCT - Establish the operating cadence for planning and execution, with conventions engineering teams actually follow - Hire and develop PMs as the team grows, while staying hands-on in your own areas - Partner with GTM and marketing so new capabilities land with positioning that matches the customer problem they solve REQUIREMENTS - 8+ years in product management, including recent hands-on IC work. You've owned a roadmap yourself, not only through a team - Experience with enterprise customers: discovery, requirements gathering, and expectation management with large accounts - Track record of quantifying the business impact of roadmap decisions and defending prioritization to stakeholders who disagree - Comfortable in a technically deep domain such as databases, data infrastructure, distributed systems, or developer tools. You don't need an engineering background, but you do need to hold your own with tech leads - Experience running product process in Linear or a comparable tool, with a clear opinion on how it should be set up - Strong written communication. Most of our decision-making happens in docs - Some people management experience, or clear readiness to take that step with a team of one to three - Working hours between GMT and ET, with flexibility for an occasional early or late call. NICE-TO-HAVES - Experience at a developer tools or open source company - Familiarity with vector search, embeddings, RAG, or agent workflows - Background working with enterprise customers alongside a self-serve motion - Experience in a company where product owned both an open source project and a commercial cloud offering 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.