Principal Product Manager II, AI/Vectors - Elasticsearch

Elastic; United States; Remote; USD 200,000 - 316,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

Health coverage

Flexible locations

Generous vacation days

Donation matching

Volunteer hours

Parental leave

Job summary

Elastic is seeking a Principal Product Manager to lead strategy and roadmap for embedding/reranking, vector database, and related capabilities. You will be the go-to expert on search/vector search, guiding indexing and hybrid retrieval with engineering and research teams.

In this senior role, you will own the vision for Elastic's vector database and core search use cases, from low-level indexing internals to developer-facing APIs and SDKs.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Working knowledge of vector search fundamentals: embeddings, ANN indexing, recall vs latency, hybrid retrieval.
• Working knowledge of generative models, model fine tuning, and document processing for large corpora.
• Track record shipping developer- or infrastructure-facing products that scaled.

Responsibilities

• Conduct market research on search/vector databases and SOTA model research to manage unstructured data with the model team.
• Evaluate the competitive landscape and develop user personas to guide features.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align strategy with business goals and prioritize features by customer feedback.
• Establish long-term goals and milestones for vector use cases; document AI and unstructured data management; allocate resources and validate roadmaps.
• Own the vision, strategy, and multi-quarter roadmap for Elastic's vector database and core search use cases, from indexing internals to APIs/SDKs.
• Partner with engineering and applied research on trade-offs; define metrics: recall, latency, index size, throughput, total cost of ownership.
• Define a unified strategy across embedding/reranking models, vector indexing, semantic ingestion, model lifecycle, and retrieval quality.
• Manage operating cadence; align research, cloud, and engineering metrics and priorities.

Skills

PM experience

Vector search

Embeddings

Hybrid retrieval

Model fine-tuning

APIs & SDKs

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering or related

Master’s degree preferred

Job description

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.

What is The Role:

We're looking for a Principal Product Manager to lead the strategy and roadmap for Elastic's embedding/reranking and vector database and related capabilities. In this senior role, you'll be the go-to expert on search/vector search, guiding the direction for technologies like vector indexing and hybrid retrieval. This position offers the chance to shape a vital part of our product, working closely with engineering and research teams to ensure that our offerings meet the needs of numerous organizations while keeping pace with the evolving landscape of AI.

What You Will Be Doing:

• 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.

What You Bring:

• 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.
• You should have 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.
• You should have a working knowledge of generative models, model fine tuning, model capabilities and document processing for large corpus
• You don't need to be a researcher, but you should hold your own with engineers on these topics. A track record of shipping developer- or infrastructure-facing products that were adopted at scale.

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People:

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

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.

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• 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 a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Security & Privacy Responsibilities: Take ownership of protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of organizational data and systems by following applicable privacy and security policies, standards, and procedures. Ensure that all individual contributions follow Elastic’s Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF). Proactively participate in mandatory role-based training to ensure personal technical execution consistently aligns with the highest standards of data protection, data privacy, and system resilience.

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 [e-mail]. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws and can view the following posters linked below:

Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster

Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster

Elasticsearch develops and distributes technology and information that is subject to U.S. and other countries’ export controls and licensing requirements for individuals who are located in or are nationals of the following sanctioned countries and regions: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Russia, including the Ukrainian territories annexed by Russia (The Crimea region of Ukraine, The Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), The Luhansk People's Republic (LNR), Kherson or Zaporizhzhia). If you are located in or are a national of one of the listed countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of your employment in this role. Please note that national origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.

Please see here for our Privacy Statement.

Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component.

The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below. In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), an alternate range may apply as specified below.

These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.

An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.

Elastic believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program. Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being.

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