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