Senior Product Manager at LanceDB (United States / Canada)
LanceDB· United States / Canada· $180k–$250k·
Role details
Equity
Summary
LanceDB is seeking a Product Manager to shape the roadmap and drive high-level direction for their AI-native data layer. The role involves collaborating with engineering leadership, analyzing competitors and user insights, and making cross-team decisions to build a focused platform on large-scale data platforms.
Job description
About LanceDB
AI advances at the speed of its research, and research moves at the speed of its data. LanceDB is the AI-native Multimodal Lakehouse: one system where a researcher curates petabytes of video, audio, and every signal derived from them with a few lines of Python, and the next training run starts as fast as the next idea. Customers like Runway, Midjourney, and Netflix build the future of AI on LanceDB, from frontier and world models to robots and autonomous vehicles.
About the Role
- Takes high-level direction (e.g., “analyze X”) and drives to results across the company
- Success looks like a LanceDB platform that is even more tightly focused on our ICP, and providing clarity on what engineering builds
What You'll Do
- Shape roadmap with CTO + eng leadership
- Deep dives into competitors, users, and adjacent tech
- Talk to users constantly; turn insight into product changes
- Drive cross-team decisions on priorities (eng, field, support)
- Work with engineering directly as a technically-respected peer
What We're Looking For
- 10+ years as a software engineer or in a highly technical product role
- Shipped and iterated on products end-to-end
- Experience working on large-scale data platforms (e.g., databases, data infra, ML/AI systems)
- Understanding of AI researcher persona - what success looks like for them, what are their pain points, what increases their happiness
- Regularly engaged with users (interviews, support, design partners, or community)
- Demonstrated ownership of ambiguous projects with minimal guidance
- Experience influencing or driving roadmap / prioritization decisions
- Strong written and verbal communication (can drive alignment across teams)
- Comfortable using data (metrics, experiments, usage) to guide decisions
- Experience contributing to or working with open source communities
Why work at LanceDB
- Culture: Startup environment with deep open-source roots; founders are former pandas co-author (Chang She) and HDFS/core contributor (Lei Xu). Engineering-heavy team (38% technical).
- Remote/hybrid policy: Not explicitly stated; likely flexible given distributed team (US, Canada, China) and startup nature.
- Notable perks/engineering culture: Work on foundational AI infrastructure used by Midjourney and Runway. Opportunities to contribute to open-source, build in Rust, and shape the multimodal data ecosystem. Fast-growing company with strong investor backing.