Director of Product

Weaviate 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. Named one of Forbes’ Top 50 AI startups, and with over a million monthly downloads, Weaviate is growing in popularity with developers and enterprises. Our team works remotely across the globe with flexibility to work from anywhere.

About the Role

Weaviate is doubling down on enterprise growth, which shifts product requirements. 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 time with customers translating their needs into a roadmap that engineering can act on, working directly with our CTO on vision and tech leads on feasibility. This is a player-coach role where you'll manage a small product team (1-3 PMs) while staying hands-on in product areas yourself.

Responsibilities

• Translate Customer Reality into a Roadmap
  • Run a continuous rhythm of customer conversations: discovery calls, renewals, and support signals
  • Turn enterprise requirements into clear specs engineering can build from, with the underlying problem attached
  • Maintain one prioritized roadmap that shows what's shipping, what got moved, and why
• Own Prioritization and Business Value
  • Attach expected business impact to significant roadmap items to argue tradeoffs 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 after they ship
• Work Closely with Engineering
  • Partner with tech leads on sequencing, feasibility, and dependency-heavy work
  • Make the cost of direction changes explicit before they land on teams
  • Give engineering enough context on customer problems that they can push back with better ideas
  • Maintain balance between customer-driven work and reliability/platform work
• Set the Operating Standard for Product
  • Establish planning and execution cadence with conventions engineering teams 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 customer problems

Requirements

• 8+ years in product management, including recent hands-on IC work (you've owned a roadmap yourself)
• Experience with enterprise customers: discovery, requirements gathering, and expectation management
• Track record of quantifying business impact of roadmap decisions and defending prioritization
• Comfortable in technically deep domains like databases, data infrastructure, or distributed systems
• Experience running product process in Linear or comparable tools with clear opinions on setup
• Strong written communication (most decision-making happens in docs)
• Some people management experience or readiness to take that step with a team of 1-3
• Working hours between GMT and ET with flexibility for occasional early/late calls

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 where product owned both an open source project and commercial cloud offering

Benefits

• 100% remote with flexible work hours
• Competitive compensation including paid time off
• Budget for conferences, co-working spaces, home office equipment
• Work with experienced and fun team members
• Atmosphere encouraging learning, personal growth, and autonomy
• Work at the forefront of search, ML/AI, and cloud-native technologies (all open source)