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