Applications are closed for this role. It was originally posted 2026-05-06. It’s no longer accepting applicants — see roles LanceDB is still hiring for →, or browse the live openings below.
About this role
Role
- Our first product-focused engineer
- Takes high-level direction (e.g., "analyze X") and drives to results
- Success looks like a LanceDB platform that is even more tightly focused on our ICP, and providing clarity on what engineering builds
Day-to-day
- Shape roadmap with CTO + eng leadership
- Deep dives into competitors, users, and adjacent tech
- Talk to users constantly; turn insight into product changes
- Drive cross-team decisions on priorities (eng, field, support)
- Work with engineering directly as a technically-respected peer
Qualifications
- 8+ years as a software engineer or in a highly technical product role
- Shipped and iterated on products end-to-end
- Experience working on large-scale data platforms (e.g., databases, data infra, ML/AI systems)
- Understanding of AI researcher persona - what success looks like for them, what are their pain points, what increases their happiness
- Regularly engaged with users (interviews, support, design partners, or community)
- Demonstrated ownership of ambiguous projects with minimal guidance
- Experience influencing or driving roadmap / prioritization decisions
- Strong written and verbal communication (can drive alignment across teams)
- Comfortable using data (metrics, experiments, usage) to guide decisions
- Experience contributing to or working with open source communities
Why
- Help define and execute product at LanceDB
- Work directly with teams building real AI systems in production
- Sit at the center of infra + product—few roles like this exist
- High ownership, zero PM theater
- Early seat in shaping a category (AI-native data layer)
- Clear path to owning larger product scope over time
Please apply for this role only if you meet all of the above qualifications, and agree with the day-to-day responsibilities.
About LanceDB
LanceDB is a developer-friendly, open-source data platform for multimodal AI. From hyper-scalable vector search to advanced retrieval for RAG, from streaming training data to interactive exploration of large-scale datasets, LanceDB is the best foundation for your AI workloads.