Principal Product Manager

About the Role

Couchbase is building the operational data platform for AI. We are hiring a Principal Product Manager, AI to own a meaningful area of the AI portfolio across Capella and Couchbase Enterprise. Reporting to the VP of AI Product Management, this Principal 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 — at the seniority where roadmap decisions, customer commitments, and analyst positioning are decided.

This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role for someone who wants to do the work at the Principal level — write the PRFAQ, sit with the customer, push the tradeoff, ship the capability, defend the roadmap to leadership and analysts — at the center of one of the most consequential shifts in enterprise data infrastructure.

What You Will Own

• Product strategy and execution across an AI portfolio area: End-to-end ownership of a meaningful area within the AI portfolio. Strategy in your area, the roadmap, the PRFAQs and PRDs, the launch, the adoption — and the iteration after launch. The scope is substantive enough that one or more Senior PMs may eventually contribute through the area you own.

• 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 crisp 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: Run design partner programs for capabilities in your area. Bring real customer voice into roadmap decisions and back to the broader team. Build a pipeline of named reference customers willing to talk publicly about what they have shipped.

• Cross-portfolio collaboration and build-vs-partner judgment: Coordinate across the broader product organization — Core Database, Capella, Analytics, Mobile and Edge, and the AI Specialist team — so AI capabilities compose as one platform. Apply a deliberate build-vs-partner lens: build where Couchbase is uniquely strong, and identify partnerships and integrations where we can deliver a better customer experience faster and more resource-efficiently than building ourselves.

• 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 and analyst credibility: Contribute meaningfully as the product owner in analyst engagements (Gartner, Forrester, IDC), customer briefings, keynote content, partner co-marketing, blog posts, and documentation for the capabilities you own.

• 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. Set an example for the team in what AI-driven PM and AI-DLC (AI-driven development lifecycle) practices look like in day-to-day execution.

• PM team development: Raise the PM bar across the AI team. Mentor and coach Senior and other PMs. Contribute to interview loops, calibration, and onboarding. Help shape the operating cadence, the PRFAQ and PRD standards, and the culture.

What You Will Deliver

• PRFAQs and PRDs for the capabilities you own, validated with named enterprise customers before engineering starts.

• Ship capabilities within your AI portfolio 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 — analyst materials, keynote content, partner co-marketing, and blog and documentation work in partnership with the AI Specialist team, PMM, and AR.

• Visible AI-driven PM practice that the rest of the team can learn from — concrete examples of AI-DLC in your daily work.

• A stronger PM bar across the AI organization — through mentoring, calibration, hiring contributions, and operating cadence.

Must Have

• 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.

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 or developing other PMs.

Location and Reporting

Based in one of the following locations: Remote-US. Regular travel to Couchbase HQ, customer sites, partner events, and industry conferences. Reports to the VP of AI Product Management.