Principal Product Manager

About the Role

Couchbase is hiring a Principal Product Manager to own execution for the Couchbase Mobile portfolio — Couchbase Lite, Sync Gateway / Capella App Services, and Edge Server. This is a mature, widely-adopted portfolio, and this Principal-level role owns the execution rigor — release quality, developer experience, and technical depth of requirements — that keeps it excellent as it grows to support edge and on-device AI use cases.

Responsibilities

• Turn product strategy for the Couchbase Mobile portfolio (Couchbase Lite, Sync Gateway, Capella App Services, Edge Server) into a detailed, well-sequenced roadmap, and drive it through to shipped, adopted product with rigor.
• Own end-to-end execution day-to-day: write detailed technical product requirements, partner closely with engineering and design, validate pre-release features hands-on, and contribute to the operational cadence (JIRA, sprint/roadmap reviews, agile ceremonies).
• Bring operational excellence to a mature, multi-product portfolio — tighten release quality, close gaps in documentation and developer experience, and systematically remove friction that's built up across established products.
• Shape how the portfolio supports on-device and edge AI use cases, and turn that into concrete, engineering-ready requirements that keep the mobile/edge products relevant as AI moves to the edge.
• Work directly with customers and prospects to pressure-test use cases and turn them into functional requirements and clear build/don't-build calls.
• Be the first line of product ownership on live customer escalations — working directly with field, sales, and support leadership to unblock accounts, and driving fixes through engineering.
• Act as the portfolio's lead technical evangelist: represent Couchbase Mobile in talks, webinars, technical content, and arm sales, solutions engineering, and marketing with the training and positioning they need.
• Represent the portfolio in cross-org planning with senior leadership — this is leadership through execution excellence and technical depth, not people management.

What You Need

• 8+ years of product management experience, with a track record of driving flawless execution for a mature product or portfolio at scale — distributed systems, databases, or developer platforms strongly preferred.
• In addition to the PM experience above, 3+ years of hands-on software development experience — writing or architecting production applications yourself, not just working alongside engineers who do.
• Demonstrated ability to take an already-successful, mature product and materially improve how well it's executed — release quality, operational rigor, developer experience — not just an ability to conceive new products from scratch.
• A genuine technical/developer background: you've built or architected client-side applications (mobile, desktop, or web) yourself, and you're comfortable prototyping. Fluency in client mobile app technologies (Flutter, KMM etc) is a plus.
• Practical understanding of the concepts behind complex distributed systems — high availability, disaster recovery, security and access control — and how they apply not just to mobile/embedded apps but to server-side sync infrastructure (Sync Gateway, Capella App Services). Familiarity with a public cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• A working, opinionated understanding of edge computing and AI concepts relevant to on-device and edge inference — and the judgment to turn that into product strategy rather than buzzwords.
• AI-forward in how you work, not just what you ship: you already use AI tools in your own day-to-day PM process (requirements, research, analysis) and push that adoption across the team.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills is a must: equally comfortable in a deep technical design review with engineers and in front of customers, press, or executive leadership.
• Fluency with agile development process and tooling (JIRA or equivalent), and experience operating in a fast-moving, cross-functional org without waiting to be told what to do.
• A high bar for ownership — hard-working, self-directed, and comfortable setting direction under ambiguity and driving alignment across engineering, marketing, and sales without formal authority.
• A strong team player — curious and collaborative, with plenty of good ideas to contribute, and happy to take the time to learn the product and the team.