Role
- Our first product-focused engineer
- Takes high-level direction (e.g., "analyze X") and drives to results
- Success looks like a LanceDB platform that is even more tightly focused on our ICP, and providing clarity on what engineering builds
Day-to-day
- 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
Qualifications
- 3–8+ 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
- Help define and execute product at LanceDB
- Work directly with teams building real AI systems in production
- Sit at the center of infra + product—few roles like this exist
- High ownership, zero PM theater
- Early seat in shaping a category (AI-native data layer)
- Clear path to owning larger product scope over time
