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.

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 workloads where querying data in place, across every system an agent might need to reach, is the deciding factor over consolidating it first.

That means owning how Starburst federates across the ecosystem, staying ahead of what AI agents actually demand from a data platform and watching the competitive field closely enough to make prioritization decisions.

You'll work alongside the Managed Icehouse and Compute Engine PMs, plus engineering and go-to-market, to set the federation vision and drive it through execution.

As Senior Product Manager, Data Federation at Starburst you will:

• 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

Some of the things we look for:

• 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
• Experience managing lakehouse product offerings and their ecosystems
• A plus, experience with query engines (Trino) that federate across heterogeneous sources, and how table format and catalog design affect performance and reliability
• Ability to Travel: This role will require 25% in-person travel for purposes including but not limited to new hire onboarding, team and department offsites, customer engagements, and other company events. Actual travel expectations may vary by role and business needs.

Where could this role be based?

Remote, US