Principal Product Manager II, AI/Vectors

About the Position

Principal Product Manager II, AI/Vectors

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale - unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data - securing and protecting private information more effectively - Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

Responsibilities

• Conduct market research to uncover emerging trends in search/vector databases as well as SOTA model research in emerging areas to manage unstructured data, working alongside our model team.
• Evaluate the competitive landscape to enhance product positioning and develop user personas that guide feature decisions.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align the product strategy with business goals while prioritizing features based on customer feedback and market demands.
• Establish long-term product goals and milestones for the vector use cases, document AI and unstructured data management to drive its development. Prioritize features and enhancements based on user feedback and technical feasibility. Allocate resources skillfully to ensure timely updates, while coordinating with engineering teams to validate roadmap assumptions. Communicate updates and expectations clearly to stakeholders and executives.
• Own the vision, strategy, and multi-quarter roadmap for Elastic's vector database as well as core search use cases, from low-level indexing internals to the developer-facing APIs and SDKs.
• Partner deeply with engineering and applied research on trade-offs, be a credible technical peer in those conversations. Define and defend the metrics that matter: recall, latency, index size, ingestion throughput, and total cost of ownership. Advance the competitiveness of Elastic AI and Vector products across all deployments - Serverless and Self-managed.
• Define a unified strategy and roadmap across embedding/reranking models and vector indexing/ semantic ingestion, model lifecycle, and end-to-end retrieval quality.
• Manage the operating cadence. Make sure shared metrics and priorities align the research, cloud, and engineering teams. Address trade-offs where model and index decisions intersect.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
• Master's degree in a relevant discipline preferred
• 8+ years in product management, with significant time on technical infrastructure, databases, search, or ML/AI platforms.
• Good working knowledge of vector search fundamentals. This includes embeddings, ANN indexing, similarity metrics, and trade-offs between recall and latency. Additionally, you need to know about hybrid retrieval.
• Working knowledge of generative models, model fine tuning, model capabilities and document processing for large corpus
• Track record of shipping developer- or infrastructure-facing products that were adopted at scale.

We Offer

• Competitive salary
• Participation in Elastic's stock program
• Company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

About the Company

Elastic is a distributed company where diversity drives our identity. We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.

Salary

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

$199,700-$315,900 USD

The typical starting salary range for this role in the select locations listed above is:

$239,800-$379,300 USD

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email [email protected]. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws, view posters linked below: Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster; Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision Poster; Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster and Know Your Rights (Poster)

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