Principal Product Manager (Search Relevance)

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

Elastic seeks an exceptional Technical Principal Product Manager to lead our teams who are pioneering the next-generation of query languages and vector database capabilities for Elasticsearch. Our Search team brings the capabilities of Elasticsearch and our platform to market for a large range of use cases including applied AI for agentic applications, and traditional search experiences. You will lead cross-team initiatives to define and deliver breakthrough technical features and platform capabilities.   Our diverse, global team spans over 40 countries, building inclusive, user-focused products at significant scale.   What You Will Be Doing:

• Lead the strategic vision and execution for new query languages, data field types and  other vector database functionalities within Elasticsearch, incorporating new innovations in machine learning and AI.
• Cross-Team Initiative Leadership: Drive complex, cross-functional initiatives with engineering, platform, and research teams to deliver groundbreaking technical innovations in search, vector storage, and AI-driven relevance, reflecting a strong track record in leading significant product initiatives and multi-platform integration programs.
• Architectural Evolution: Champion the evolution of Elastic's search architecture, focusing on scalable vector indexing, efficient similarity search, reranking and advanced query processing.
• Technical Product Ownership: Write detailed product artifacts such as PRDs, PRFAQs for new search language constructs and vector database features, ensuring developer usability, based on experience managing developer platforms and launching developer-facing services.
• Provide Customer and Competitive Insights & Research: Conduct in-depth market analysis, competitive technical assessments, and engage with thought leaders to inform the technical roadmap, consistent with research and strategic product definition.
• Developer & Community Engagement: Collaborate with developers, data scientists, and the open-source community to gather feedback, validate designs, and drive adoption of new capabilities, leveraging experience in developer relations and growing feature adoption.
• P&L ownership : Be accountable for driving rapid growth and adoption of Elasticsearch, with continued evaluation of our pricing, margins and COGS of released features.

What You Bring:

• Demonstrated leadership in defining and launching complex technical products in search, databases, query languages, or AI/ML platforms.
• Deep expertise in vector databases, search pipelines, similarity search algorithms, and distributed systems architecture, including integrating ML models, adapting LLMs, and building privacy-preserving compute platforms.
• Exceptional communication skills for complex technical concepts.
• Curiosity to truly understand the technology that serves the majority of the world’s search experiences
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, data platforms, and cloud-native architectures (e.g., AWS ML services).
• Deep empathy for developer challenges, translating them into product opportunities.
• Experience defining technical value propositions and competitive differentiation.
• Strong interest and understanding of cutting-edge technologies like vector databases, ML, and generative AI (e.g., RAG, LLM integration).
• Direct PM experience with search platforms, AI/ML platforms, or developer tooling is highly desirable.
• Ability to read and understand code (e.g., Python, Java, Go) and engage in technical discussions, reflecting a strong technical foundation including past software engineering roles.

 

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 Ne