Principal Product Manager, Aerospike Data Platform

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has proven that model intelligence alone is insufficient for mission-critical enterprise environments. To deliver real business value, intelligent systems must be continuously grounded in the real-time reality of the enterprise. This requires an operational architecture capable of maintaining state, dynamically assembling context, executing real-time decisions, and preserving action consequences at scale.

At Aerospike, we are building the real-time state, context, and decisioning platform for operational AI. We are seeking an experienced and visionary Senior or Principal Product Manager to drive the strategy and execution of our core data platform. As a strong technical generalist with deep expertise across SQL, NoSQL, and distributed architectures, you will design the foundation that enables intelligent systems and AI agents to continuously understand, act, and learn from enterprise reality in real time.

Key Responsibilities

• Operational AI & Data Platform Strategy: Own the end-to-end roadmap for our core distributed data engine. Drive capabilities that support real-time state management, low-latency context assembly, high-throughput decisioning, and durable consequence management for mission-critical workloads.
• Engine Strategy & Vision: Own the end-to-end roadmap for our core distributed database engine. Lead innovation across our Hybrid Memory Architecture (HMA), secondary indexing mechanisms, storage layer optimizations, and Cross-Datacenter Replication (XDR).
• Developer & Agent Ecosystems:  Build modern, developer-first tooling, APIs, and SDKs (including Model Context Protocol/MCP integrations) that make it seamless for engineers and autonomous AI agents to interact with real-time enterprise state.
• Customer-Centric Prioritization: Partner closely with principal database architects, SRE leads, and field teams at Fortune 500 companies to translate extreme real-time processing demands into actionable technical requirements.
• Performance & Scale Optimization: Collaborate directly with Database Kernel and Performance Engineering teams to continuously push sub-millisecond tail latency, optimize memory footprints, and expand multi-cloud and hardware capabilities (NVMe, CXL, PMEM).
• Metrics, Telemetry & Economics:: Define key operational KPIs, analyze engine telemetry, and leverage benchmark data to guide feature trade-offs and ensure our platform delivers industry-leading throughput with sustainable infrastructure economics.
• Go-to-Market Alignment: Partner with Product Marketing and Solutions Engineering and field teams to translate deep technical breakthroughs into clear business outcomes and market positioning.

What We’re Looking For

• Data Infrastructure Leadership: 5+ years managing infrastructure-level software products, with deep experience in enterprise databases (NoSQL, SQL, NewSQL), distributed storage engines, or high-performance systems platforms.
• Distributed Systems Mastery: Strong generalist foundation in both relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL) database design. Deep technical understanding of consensus protocols, transactional consistency models, replication strategies, and low-level hardware utilization (RAM/NVMe/Storage).
• Operational AI & Systems Architecture Mindset: Strong understanding of modern enterprise AI challenges beyond model inference—specifically how intelligent systems maintain state, retrieve context, and execute real-time decision loops.
• Developer Experience Focus: Passion for creating modern developer experiences. You understand how modern software is built and know how to design clean APIs, CLI workflows, and SDKs that developers (and AI agents) love to use.
• Enterprise Customer Empathy: Proven ability to step into technical design reviews with enterprise architects, understand their real-time application constraints, and build consensus around complex architectural trade-offs.
• Systems Mindset: You aren’t afraid to roll up your sleeves to read design specs, test bench results, or review memory usage models with kernel engineers.
• Exceptional Communication: Exceptional skill in translating deep database architecture concepts into clear business outcomes for both executive leadership and deeply technical practitioners.

Salary Range: $220,000 – $280,000
(Actual compensation will be based on experience, location, and other relevant factors.)

Aerospike is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to an environment free from discrimination based on race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or veteran status.

To keep our recruitment pipeline as high-performance as our database, Aerospike uses AI-driven tools to streamline resume reviews, scheduling, and communication. While we love smart tech, we value human connection even more. AI helps us optimize the process, but real people make 100% of the actual hiring decisions.