Principal Product Manager II, AI/Vectors

About the role

We're looking for a Principal Product Manager to lead the strategy and roadmap for Elastic's embedding/reranking and vector database and related capabilities. In this senior role, you'll be the go-to expert on search/vector search, guiding the direction for technologies like vector indexing and hybrid retrieval. This position offers the chance to shape a vital part of our product, working closely with engineering and research teams to ensure that our offerings meet the needs of numerous organizations while keeping pace with the evolving landscape of AI.

Responsibilities

• Conduct market research to uncover emerging trends in search/vector databases as well as SOTA model research in emerging areas to manage unstructured data, working alongside our model team
• Evaluate the competitive landscape to enhance product positioning and develop user personas that guide feature decisions
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align the product strategy with business goals while prioritizing features based on customer feedback and market demands
• Establish long-term product goals and milestones for the vector use cases, document AI and unstructured data management to drive its development
• Prioritize features and enhancements based on user feedback and technical feasibility
• Allocate resources skillfully to ensure timely updates, while coordinating with engineering teams to validate roadmap assumptions
• Communicate updates and expectations clearly to stakeholders and executives
• Own the vision, strategy, and multi-quarter roadmap for Elastic's vector database as well as core search use cases, from low-level indexing internals to the developer-facing APIs and SDKs
• Partner deeply with engineering and applied research on trade-offs, be a credible technical peer in those conversations
• Define and defend the metrics that matter: recall, latency, index size, ingestion throughput, and total cost of ownership
• Advance the competitiveness of Elastic AI and Vector products across all deployments - Serverless and Self-managed
• Define a unified strategy and roadmap across embedding/reranking models and vector indexing/ semantic ingestion, model lifecycle, and end-to-end retrieval quality
• Manage the operating cadence. Make sure shared metrics and priorities align the research, cloud, and engineering teams
• Address trade-offs where model and index decisions intersect

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
• Master's degree in a relevant discipline preferred
• 8+ years in product management, with significant time on technical infrastructure, databases, search, or ML/AI platforms
• Good working knowledge of vector search fundamentals, including embeddings, ANN indexing, similarity metrics, and trade-offs between recall and latency, as well as hybrid retrieval
• Working knowledge of generative models, model fine tuning, model capabilities and document processing for large corpus
• Don't need to be a researcher, but should hold your own with engineers on these topics
• Track record of shipping developer- or infrastructure-facing products that were adopted at scale

Benefits

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave
• Company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings
• Participation in Elastic's stock program

Pay

Compensation is in the form of base salary with no variable component. The typical starting salary range for this role is $199,700—$315,900 USD. In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), the range is $239,800—$379,300 USD.