Staff Product Manager, Real Time Data Analytics Platform

What You Will Do

• Own the product strategy for Confluent's streaming analytics engine: storage, materialization, query serving, performance, and developer experience.
• Develop competitive strategy against established real-time analytical databases, articulating Confluent's differentiated value as a streaming-native alternative.
• Drive key architectural and product tradeoffs across consistency, latency, query performance, cost, and developer ergonomics.
• Partner deeply with engineering to navigate the technical complexity of building a new cloud-native data system at scale.
• Collaborate with peer product managers who own downstream experiences including AI, context delivery, and application integration, to ensure the engine meets the needs of the products built on it.
• Work with customers and design partners to validate use cases across real-time analytics, operational applications, and AI, shaping the developer experience and refining go-to-market positioning.
• Collaborate with Confluent's broader product and platform teams to ensure tight integration with Kafka, Flink, and Confluent Cloud.
• Define success metrics, cost models, and pricing strategy for a new product area.
• Influence Confluent's company-wide platform strategy through executive-level communication and cross-functional leadership.

What You Will Bring

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience in product management or related technical roles.
• 5+ years of experience taking technical infrastructure or data products from conception to launch.
• Deep familiarity with real-time analytics, database internals, or streaming data platform architecture, either through product management or hands-on engineering.
• Experience defining and launching products in the data infrastructure, analytics database, or stream processing space.
• Strong technical judgment, comfortable navigating tradeoffs in distributed systems, storage engines, query performance, and cost optimization.
• Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with executive-level visibility and communicating technical strategy to senior leadership.

What Gives You an Edge

• Engineering background in analytical databases, stream processing, or distributed storage systems.
• Experience with real-time OLAP engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Apache Druid, StarRocks, Apache Pinot) as a builder, product manager, or power user.
• Familiarity with Kafka, Flink, or similar streaming infrastructure.
• Experience building products that serve AI/ML workloads for retrieval, feature serving, or context delivery.
• Prior experience with cloud-native infrastructure products and consumption-based pricing models.
• Experience working on open source data infrastructure projects.