Principal Product Manager - Director Cloudera Data Warehouse (Hive / Impala)

Business Area:

Product Mgmt.

Seniority Level:

Director

Job Description: 

At Cloudera, we empower people to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. With as much data under management as the hyperscalers, we're the preferred data partner for the top companies in almost every industry.  Powered by the relentless innovation of the open source community, Cloudera advances digital transformation for the world’s largest enterprises.

Our Data Services Pillar is the heart of data innovation. We don’t just work with technology; we build it. Our mission is to empower data practitioners by creating seamless, enterprise-grade experiences for data engineering, warehousing, streaming, operational databases, and AI.

Cloudera is seeking an experienced Principal Product Manager (Individual Contributor) for our mission-critical Cloudera Data Warehouse (CDW) service. In this role, you will own our cloud-native data warehouse, driving the deep technical integration of Apache Iceberg with Apache Hive and Apache Impala virtual warehouses, orchestrated via Kubernetes across public and private cloud environments.

You will lead the evolution toward a modern data lakehouse architecture, leveraging CDW’s decoupled design—Control Plane, Catalogs, and Virtual Warehouses—to deliver massive scalability, workload isolation, and automated optimization for enterprise ELT/ETL workflows. This is a highly technical role requiring strong product vision, Kubernetes expertise, and a passion for simplifying complex systems for global enterprise users.

As a Principal Product Manager you will:

• Product Vision & Strategy: Articulate and own the strategic direction for our core SQL engines, Apache Hive and Apache Impala for Cloudera Dare Warehouse (CDW) service.  Define the essential functions and capabilities required to serve distinct customer needs, from high-concurrency BI to complex ETL/ELT workloads. 

• Roadmap Management: Develop and maintain a prioritized product roadmap aligned with product strategy. Make data-driven decisions on feature priorities, balancing customer needs, market trends, and technical debt.

• Apache Iceberg Integration: Prioritize and define the features that enable advanced data lakehouse capabilities (e.g., schema evolution, time travel) with the latest Apache Iceberg versions across both Hive and Impala engines.  Ensure cross-engine compatibility and interoperability with other data services.  

• Own the Kubernetes Roadmap: Direct the development of features for elasticity, cost optimization, and automated resource management across the hybrid cloud, ensuring cloud-native efficiency for the SQL engines.

• Market & Customer Insight: Conduct continuous market research to understand the competitive landscape and identify new opportunities. Serve as the primary conduit for customer feedback through direct engagements with field, customers and partners.

• Hybrid Multi-Cloud Product Definition: Define the product for a consistent experience across public clouds and private cloud/on-premises deployments, while addressing the unique requirements of each form factor.

• Go-to-Market & Enablement: Drive successful product launches by collaborating with Marketing, Sales, and Documentation teams. Create compelling messaging and enable both internal teams and customers.

• Business Ownership: Define and track KPIs for the CDW service's success, including adoption and revenue

• Requirement Authoring: Write clear, concise, and high-quality Product Requirement Documents (PRDs), create epics, and detailed user stories that define exactly what needs to be built. For a data platform, this often means writing requirements for APIs, security models, performance benchmarks, and deployment patterns (e.g., Kubernetes operators).

• Technical Partnership: Work as a close partner with Engineering to understand and negotiate technical trade-offs, architecture decisions, and implementation complexity. A Cloudera PM needs strong technical acumen to credibly discuss the underlying Apache projects (like Hive, Impala, Ranger, Kafka, Iceberg).

• UX Simplification: Collaborate with UX/Design to ensure that complex infrastructure and data management features are packaged into a simple, intuit