Principal Product Manager, Data & AI Platforms ( Hybrid in Bangalore )

Smartsheet Smartsheet · Seattle · India · Product Mgt

Principal Product Manager for Data & AI Platforms at Smartsheet, focusing on strategic direction and execution of the foundational data ecosystem. The role treats data and AI infrastructure as a product, ensuring high quality, scalability, and alignment with business and AI objectives. Responsibilities include driving strategic alignment, managing the product lifecycle, owning the execution roadmap for data platform features, championing governance and quality, delivering requirements, engaging stakeholders, acting as a data ambassador, and providing mentorship. Key responsibilities also involve evangelizing 'Data as a Product', partnering with AI/Engineering teams for AI enablement, guiding data architecture strategy, defining data integrity and semantic impact, and establishing data governance standards including compliance.

What you'd actually do

  1. Drive Strategic Alignment: Lead the alignment of data governance and AI-driven use cases across Engineering, Product, and Business organizations to ensure unified goals, rigorous prioritization, and clear scoping of platform capabilities.
  2. Lead Product Lifecycle: Manage both inbound (requirements gathering, strategic roadmap definition) and outbound (internal/external evangelism, community engagement, customer feedback loops) product management for the data and AI platform.
  3. Own the Execution Roadmap: Define and drive the execution roadmap for critical data platform features, including the enablement of AI capabilities, streamlined data ingestion/onboarding, and foundational data vision initiatives.
  4. Champion Governance & Quality: Own the business-stakeholder perspective for data quality and governance, ensuring the platform provides reliable, secure, and compliant data assets for all consumers.
  5. Deliver High-Quality Requirements: Provide a continuous stream of detailed requirements with clear, measurable acceptance criteria, demonstrating a deep understanding of both upstream data source complexities and downstream end-user consumption needs.

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of experience in Product Management
  • significant and proven focus on AI & data infrastructure, core backend platforms, or high-scale technical SaaS products
  • Proven track record of owning and successfully driving execution roadmaps for critical, scalable, and reliable data systems
  • Extensive and current understanding of Data Lakes, Data Mesh principles, Medallion Architecture, and modern cloud data platforms (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake)
  • Exceptional ability to translate complex technical debt or architectural needs into clear business value, actionable initiatives, and precise "acceptance criteria" for diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders
  • Ability to treat internal developers, analysts, and external partners as "customers"
  • High-level understanding of data governance, semantic impact, and data modeling
  • Experience with compliance and ethics in data management

Nice to have

  • Mentorship experience
  • Experience with internal/external evangelism and community engagement

What the JD emphasized

  • proven focus on AI & data infrastructure
  • Proven track record of owning and successfully driving execution roadmaps for critical, scalable, and reliable data systems.
  • Extensive and current understanding of:
  • clear, measurable acceptance criteria
  • strict privacy compliance (GDPR, CCPA, SOC2)

Other signals

  • Data as a Product
  • AI Enablement
  • Data Governance
  • Scalable Data Platform