Senior Product Manager, Data Federation

Starburst is seeking a Senior Product Manager to lead its data federation strategy and deliver functionality for workloads that query data across distributed sources. The role defines federation capabilities for AI agents and interoperability with customer catalog implementations, working with product, engineering, and go-to-market teams to drive the vision through execution.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• experience with query engines (Trino) that federate across heterogeneous sources, and how table format and catalog design affect performance and reliability