[Hiring] Director of Product @Weaviate

Role Description

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.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in product management, including recent hands-on IC work.
• 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.
• Experience running product process in Linear or a comparable tool.
• Strong written communication.
• 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.

Requirements

• 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.
• Maintain one prioritized roadmap that shows what's shipping, what got moved to make room, and why.
• Attach an expected business impact to significant roadmap items.
• Assess incoming enterprise requests for criticality and pattern.
• Manage expectations across sales, leadership, and customers when priorities change.
• Define success metrics for major features and follow up on them after they ship.
• 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.
• Keep the balance between customer-driven work and the reliability and platform work engineering needs to do.
• Establish the operating cadence for planning and execution.
• 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.

Benefits

• 100% remote with flexible work hours.
• Competitive compensation, including paid time off.
• 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.
• Freedom, flexibility, and responsibilities.
• Work at the forefront of search, ML/AI, and cloud-native technologies - all of it is open source.