Director, Product Management — Core Database Engine & AI

Teradata Group; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Teradata is seeking a senior product leader to drive the strategy and execution of its core database engine. You will shape the multi-year roadmap, partner with senior engineering leaders, and own performance, cost, and complexity trade-offs across the engine, optimizer, and IR across storage formats.

You will lead AI/LLM-enabled enhancements inside the engine, focusing on speed, autonomy, and safe integration with SQL while aligning with ANSI standards and customer needs.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in databases, query engines, or distributed data systems with senior PM or equivalent senior engineering experience.
• Expert understanding of database internals: planning, optimization, execution models and MPP trade-offs.
• Deep SQL expertise with strong language design, ergonomics and compatibility opinions.
• A hands-on performance mindset: reading plans, building benchmarks, root-cause analysis.
• Working understanding of LLMs/AI agents and their impact on database design.

Responsibilities

• Own the engine vision and multi-year roadmap, balancing performance, cost, and complexity.
• Lead AI agent rethink for core engine components and apply GenAI/ML to speed and autonomy.
• Oversee optimizer, execution, and workload management with KPI-driven goals.
• Own Iceberg/Delta Lake engine features, including pruning, pushdown and write paths.
• Design SQL features and language extensions that are safe, readable, and compatible with ANSI SQL.

Skills

Databases expertise

SQL proficiency

Performance mindset

AI/LLM awareness

Distributed systems

Architecture knowledge

Roadmap strategy

Education

MS/PhD in databases or distributed systems or ML for systems

CS degree

Job description

Our Company

At Teradata, we believe that people thrive when empowered with better information. Teradata Autonomous Knowledge Platform activates enterprise intelligence by unifying data, knowledge and business context to achieve tangible outcomes. With Teradata, organizations can provide agents with full context for impact when it matters. Our solution lets businesses connect and scale on premises, in the cloud, or through a hybrid approach. Teradata delivers real business value with AI.

What You'll Do

In this role, you will lead product strategy and execution for Teradata's core database engine: the massively parallel query engine behind every workload on the platform. You will shape the roadmap across the optimizer, execution runtime, workload management, and Global Planner, and own how the engine performs on native storage, cloud object storage, and open table formats such as Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake.

This role sits at the intersection of the database engine and AI. AI agents are becoming the dominant consumers of enterprise data, issuing high volumes of exploratory, speculative queries, while GenAI and machine learning can improve the engine from the inside. Every core component needs to be rethought in this light, and you will lead that rethink and turn it into a roadmap engineering can build.

Two things anchor the role. Performance: you will spend significant time inside real workloads, query plans, and benchmarks, working with engineering to deliver measurable gains release after release. SQL: you will be the steward of Teradata SQL, the surface customers live in, making its syntax, semantics, and ergonomics simpler, more expressive, and safer for developers, analysts, and AI agents.

• Strategy: Own the engine vision and multi-year roadmap, co-owning architecture direction with senior engineering leaders and making principled trade-offs across performance, cost, and complexity.
• AI and agents: Lead the rethink of every core engine component for AI agents as the new dominant workload, and apply GenAI and ML inside the engine to make it faster and more autonomous.
• Optimizer, execution, and workload management: Agents send many redundant queries. Explore optimizing across queries, sharing intermediate results, and returning early or approximate answers. Apply learned cardinality and cost models and LLM-assisted rewrite, with guardrails that protect plan stability. Define how workload management absorbs bursty machine traffic through agent identity, priorities, and budgets.
• Performance: Work hands-on with engineering on query plans, regressions, and bottlenecks. Own the benchmark suite and KPIs (latency, concurrency, plan stability, price-performance), including agentic workloads, and build regression gates into releases.
• Open Table formats: Own the engine side of Iceberg and Delta Lake (scan planning, pruning, pushdown, write paths) so customers never trade performance for openness. Automate statistics, clustering, and compaction with AI.
• SQL language and query interface: Design features that turn complex problems into simple, readable queries, reduce footguns while keeping power and backward compatibility, and stay aligned with ANSI SQL. Make the dialect something agents can safely generate and execute, and let agents steer with cost estimates, plan explanations, and hints.

Who You'll Work With

You will work with senior database engineering leaders, performance engineering, AI platform teams, the open table format product team, sales engineering, and executive leadership across the US, Europe, and India. This role starts as an individual contributor, leading through technical depth and influence and mentoring Staff-level PMs. It may grow into managing a team of product managers.

What Makes You a Qualified Candidate

• 15+ years in databases, query engines, or distributed data systems, including senior product management or equivalent principal or staff engineering experience
• Expert understanding of database internals: query planning, cost-based optimization, execution models, and MPP trade-offs
• Deep SQL expertise: a heavy SQL user (data engineer, analyst, or DBA) with strong opinions on language design, ergonomics, and compatibility
• A hands-on performance mindset: reading query plans, designing benchmarks, and finding root causes with senior engineers
• A strong working understanding of LLMs and AI agents, and an informed view on how they change database design and how ML can improve database internals
• Architecture-level knowledge of Snowflake, Databricks, and ClickHouse, and fluency in lakehouse architecture and open table formats
• Degree in Computer Science or a related field; an MS or PhD in databases, distributed systems, or ML for systems is a plus

What You'll Bring

• First-principles thinking and good taste: willingness to question long-standing database assumptions, a preference for elegance over verbosity, customer obsession, daily use of GenAI tools, and the credibility to earn the trust of senior engineers
• The ability to read research critically, separate promise from hype, and design experiments to prove value, with a track record of setting multi-year platform strategy
• A plus: experience designing SQL features or language extensions, hands-on work with optimizers or learned database components, open-source contributions, or publications at SIGMOD, VLDB, or CIDR

Why We Think You'll Love Teradata

We prioritize a people-first culture because we know our people are at the very heart of our success. We embrace a flexible work model because we trust our people to make decisions about how, when, and where they work. We focus on well-being because we care about our people and their ability to thrive both personally and professionally. We are an anti-racist company because our dedication to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is more than a statement. It is a deep commitment to doing the work to foster an equitable environment that celebrates people for all of who they are.