Product Lead / Entrepreneur in Residence (Project Bonsai)

About JetBrains
At JetBrains, code is our passion. Ever since we started, back in 2000, we have strived to make the strongest, most effective developer tools on earth. By automating routine checks and corrections, our tools speed up production, freeing developers to grow, discover, and create.

The Innovation Hub at JetBrains is dedicated to exploring groundbreaking products that open new markets and transform pioneering ideas into impactful solutions.

About the team
We are Project Bonsai, an early-stage experimental startup within JetBrains’ Innovation Hub. 

Our goal is to build the infrastructure for AI-spec-driven development, where:

• System requirements, architecture, and code are formally connected.
• AI agents are guided by infrastructure requirements and developers' intentions for greater reliability and trust.
• The system can detect and prevent spec-code drift.

We are a small, hands-on team, working on a project that’s still in its early stages. We have a working prototype, but the core intermediate language design, architecture, tooling, and UX are still being shaped.

This is an opportunity to do greenfield product work, not maintenance or incremental development.

About the role

We are looking for a Product Lead / Entrepreneur in Residence to work alongside the technical founder and own the product strategy for Bonsai.

This is not a traditional product management role. Your focus will be on deeply understanding real developer workflows: where specs, architecture, and code break down, what causes friction, and what problems are actually worth solving. You will translate these insights into concrete product requirements and priorities.

In this role, you will:

• Own the product strategy: You’ll define the product direction based on the existing technical foundation and validate the strongest hypotheses.
• Run continuous discovery: This involves talking directly to developers to understand workflows, constraints, and failure modes in real systems.
• Define the initial scope: You’ll be responsible for identifying the ICP, key scenarios, and what to build first, balancing ambition with feasibility.
• Track the ecosystem: You’ll monitor adjacent tools, competitors, and research to inform positioning and priorities.
• Work closely with the engineering team: You’ll help everyone maintain focus and alignment in a highly ambiguous, early-stage environment.

We will be happy to have you on our team if you have:

• Hands-on product ownership experience or experience in a role with an equivalent level of responsibility where you owned discovery and delivery end to end.
• Technical background or mindset, including the ability to work with complex technical systems; production coding experience is a strong plus.
• Comfort with ambiguity, evidenced by experience turning unclear problems into a concrete plan through discovery and iteration.
• Zero-to-one exposure, such as experience with early product discovery, design partners, or first real adoption.
• Relevant domain experience, for example with developer tools, IDEs, workflow products, or developer productivity platforms.
• Familiarity with or curiosity about AI agents and AI-driven tooling used in real systems.

Why join Project Bonsai?

• Foundational work: Help define a new direction in developer tooling at the intersection of programming languages and AI.
• Deep technical problems: Work on language design, formal specs, tooling, and AI agents – not surface-level features.
• Real ownership: Own the product’s strategy and direction, working in a role closer to that of a founder than a classic PM.
• JetBrains environment: Enjoy startup-level autonomy with JetBrains’ engineering culture and long-term mindset.

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