Principal Category Strategist

The role

Positioning & Narrative Architecture (PNA) is a net-new function at MongoDB. PNA serves as the company’s system of record for positioning, messaging, and narrative to keep our outreach across the company coherent. The team runs lean, flat, and automates as much as possible using in-house-built agentic tooling for market sensing, content generation, and impact measurement.

This role sits in the Narrative & Category Strategy pod and is responsible for company and product positioning coherence, narrative architecture, and governance—the most critical part of PNA’s mandate. The Principal Category Strategist owns the definition and evolution of MongoDB's category strategy across core data platform, search and retrieval, embedding models, and AI agents by developing positioning that inputs into our in-house-built Positioning-as-Code (PAC) system that automates and scales content generation for Marketing and Sales. This role requires close collaboration with Competitive & Market Intelligence, Product Management, Sales, and executive leadership. Consequently, the right candidate has superior executive presence, high agency, and low ego.

This is a senior IC individual contributor role equivalent to Director that helps set standards for other strategists, independently drive cross-functional alignment, and serves as a key voice in articulating MongoDB’s positioning and messaging strategies.

We are looking to speak to candidates who are based in Dublin for our hybrid working model.

What you'll own

Category definition and evolution. You will set MongoDB's position within relevant categories and keep it current as the market, competitors, and MongoDB's own product portfolio continue to rapidly evolve. You will own driving alignment with senior leadership by weighing risks, benefits, and tradeoffs to bring clarity to ambiguity.

Positioning governance. You will author, curate, and maintain positioning in PAC's durable core layer, and manage the collaboration and approval cycles with senior leadership. You will also build and run the governance process that keeps the positioning current as quickly as the market moves today.

Validation. You will work across teams, leverage data, and spend time with internal and external stakeholders to pressure-test every category claim against the strongest counterargument a competitor, an analyst, or a skeptical customer can make. You will also build and maintain the competitive scans in collaboration with Competitive & Market Intelligence and run persona-based stress tests that keep the category position credible and memorable instead of aspirational.

Frameworks other strategists use. You will build the reusable models that give the rest of PNA shared methods to argue for MongoDB's position without duplicating previous work.

Executive and category moments. You will represent PNA where the category gets defended in real time, such as executive briefings, analyst conversations, and flagship event narratives. You will also own the story-ready judgment call for launch-readiness assessment for new products, features, and capabilities.

What you bring

• 10+ years in positioning, category creation, or narrative strategy with a proven track record in enterprise software, ideally in database, cloud infrastructure, AI/ML platforms, or AI-native startups

• Direct experience building and/or defending a category position against a moving competitive set with the ability to name the counterargument to your own position before a competitor does

• Comfort operating with multi-year thinking, managing executive sign-offs, and the discipline to defend long-term positioning against short-term thinking

• A record of building frameworks or models that other strategists and marketers adopted

• Executive presence. You will brief C-suite stakeholders and hold a position under pushback from people more senior than you

• Fluency with MongoDB's evolving competitive landscape and the broader AI ecosystem

• Comfort working with AI and agents inside a governed, versioned system. You need to be able to think in terms of breaking down positioning, tracking its lineage across deliverables, and automating approval gates rather than creating one-off decks

What sets this role apart

This isn't a generalist product marketing role and is instead for a principal-level senior leader who treats category strategy as a discipline distinct from product positioning. MongoDB needs one person accountable for getting the hardest, slowest-moving, highest-stakes claims right. You'll work alongside a team of senior strategists who are at the forefront of evolving product marketing with a governed, agentic positioning system, which means your time goes to the judgment calls the system can't make on its own. That includes what MongoDB's category is, why, and what happens when someone disagrees.