Backed by Index and a16z.
About the role
The lakehouse-only bet, bring your data into one lake, bring a fast engine to query it there, held up for years. It doesn't anymore. Agents don't sit inside one lake and wait their turn. They reason across the whole estate, firing off queries at production speed, and they generate new questions mid-reasoning based on what they just found. You can't materialize a view for a query that didn't exist five seconds ago.
What they're looking for
- Identify and make the case for the next set of workloads, human-driven or agent-led, where federating across sources beats consolidating them, especially as agent reasoning outruns what any single lake can hold
- Define what agents actually need from data infrastructure beyond access: a way to signal partial visibility instead of returning a confident, complete-sounding answer built on whatever it could see
- Define how Starburst's federation layer interoperates with the catalog implementations customers actually run, Polaris, Glue, Unity Catalog, Snowflake Open Catalog, and others, rather than betting on a single one
- 6+ years as a Product Manager, with real ownership of a technical infrastructure or data platform product
- Real exposure to federated query or data virtualization. You understand why "query everything without moving it" solves a core data engineering problem and isn't just a marketing line
- A clear point of view on why precomputation and materialized views break under agentic workloads, and what a data platform needs to do instead when queries are generated mid-reasoning rather than scheduled
More about this role
Starburst delivers enterprise intelligence at scale by giving organizations secure, governed access to all their data, wherever it lives. Built for distributed data environments, Starburst helps enterprises power AI and analytics without the cost and complexity of traditional data consolidation. With open standards including Trino and Apache Iceberg, Starburst enables trusted access to complete enterprise context while helping organizations avoid vendor lock-in. Leading global enterprises trust Starburst to fuel AI, analytics, and enterprise intelligence. Learn more at starburst.ai .
The lakehouse-only bet, bring your data into one lake, bring a fast engine to query it there, held up for years. It doesn't anymore. Agents don't sit inside one lake and wait their turn. They reason across the whole estate, firing off queries at production speed, and they generate new questions mid-reasoning based on what they just found. You can't materialize a view for a query that didn't exist five seconds ago.
We're seeking a Senior Product Manager to lead Starburst's federation strategy. Your primary focus is finding and delivering the product functionality that wins the next generation of...
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