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Salary: USD 180,000 - 215,000 / annual
Starburst is seeking a Senior Product Manager to lead the company's data federation strategy. The role focuses on delivering product functionality that enables querying data in place across distributed systems—a critical capability as AI agents increasingly reason across entire data estates rather than consolidating data into single lakes.
In this position, you will own Starburst's federation strategy and vision, working to identify and prioritize the next generation of workloads where federated querying outperforms data consolidation. You'll define what AI agents actually need from data infrastructure, including mechanisms to signal partial visibility and avoid overconfident answers based on incomplete data access. You'll also shape how Starburst's federation layer interoperates with catalog implementations customers actually use—Polaris, Glue, Unity Catalog, Snowflake Open Catalog, and others—rather than betting on a single standard.
You'll collaborate closely with product managers owning Managed Icehouse and Compute Engine, plus engineering and go-to-market teams, to set and execute the federation vision. Key responsibilities include identifying workloads where federation beats consolidation (especially as agentic reasoning scales), defining agent requirements for data infrastructure beyond basic access, and ensuring interoperability across the catalog ecosystem.
The ideal candidate brings 6+ years of product management experience with real ownership of technical infrastructure or data platform products. You should have genuine exposure to federated query or data virtualization and understand why "query everything without moving it" solves core data engineering problems. You'll have a clear perspective on why precomputation and materialized views break under agentic workloads and what platforms must do instead when queries are generated mid-reasoning. Experience with lakehouse product ecosystems and query engines like Trino that federate across heterogeneous sources is highly valued. The role requires 25% travel for onboarding, offsites, customer engagements, and company events.
