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Weaviate is an AI-native vector database startup, named one of Forbes' Top 50 AI startups with over a million monthly downloads. The company is shifting focus toward enterprise customers and needs a Director of Product to own product strategy and decision-making across the Weaviate Database, Weaviate Cloud, and agent products.
In this player-coach role, you will manage a small product team (1-3 PMs) while continuing to own product areas yourself. You'll spend significant time with enterprise customers, translating their requirements into a prioritized roadmap that engineering can execute. You'll work directly with the CTO on vision and with tech leads on feasibility.
Key responsibilities include running a continuous rhythm of customer conversations (discovery, renewals, support signals), turning enterprise requirements into clear specs with underlying problems attached, and maintaining one prioritized roadmap showing what's shipping and why. You'll own prioritization and business value by attaching expected business impact to roadmap items, assessing incoming requests for criticality and pattern, managing expectations across sales and leadership, and defining success metrics for major features.
You'll partner closely with engineering on sequencing, feasibility, and dependency-heavy work, making the cost of direction changes explicit before they land on teams. You'll establish operating standards for product by defining planning and execution cadence, hiring and developing PMs as the team grows, and partnering with GTM and marketing on positioning.
The ideal candidate has 8+ years in product management with recent hands-on IC work, experience with enterprise customers, a track record of quantifying business impact and defending prioritization, and comfort in technically deep domains like databases, data infrastructure, or developer tools. You should be experienced running product process in Linear or comparable tools, have strong written communication skills, and some people management experience or clear readiness to manage 1-3 PMs. Working hours should fall between GMT and ET with flexibility for occasional early/late calls.
Nice-to-haves include experience at developer tools or open source companies, familiarity with vector search, embeddings, RAG, or agent workflows, background working with enterprise customers alongside self-serve motions, and experience with companies managing both open source projects and commercial cloud offerings.
