---
title: "Ankush Shankar - Principal Product Manager in Greater Bengaluru Area | Tal"
description: "Meet Ankush Shankar, Data & AI | Product & Strategy based in Greater Bengaluru Area. AI stack includes langchain."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/ankush-shankar/share-image"
---

# Ankush Shankar on Tal

## Headline

Data & AI \| Product & Strategy

## About

I build products that make AI systems more grounded, reliable, and fast\. At my core, I work on the plumbing that helps AI find and reason with the right context: search, retrieval, vector databases, and the data protocols that sit between knowledge and intelligence\. I currently lead product for AI infrastructure, focusing on how enterprise systems feed high\-quality context to agents and copilots\. My goal is simple: make it easier for developers and data teams to build AI that actually understands the problem, not just predict the next token\. In the past, I’ve worked across search, data platforms, and AI systems: from large\-scale consumer experiences to startup environments\. What ties it all together is a deep curiosity about how information becomes understanding, and how better retrieval leads to better reasoning\. I write and speak about context engineering, retrieval architectures, and AI infrastructure design, because that’s where the real innovation in AI is happening\.

## Location

Greater Bengaluru Area

## AI stack

langchain

## Work experience

Principal Product Manager at Couchbase, Sep 2025 \- Present · 1 yr 2 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India · Hybrid, \* Received fast\-track promotion for impact on Search and AI readiness initiatives\. \* Driving the AI Infrastructure charter: designing how Couchbase powers context engineering for AI agents\. \* Focus areas: retrieval pipelines, hybrid ranking, agent protocols, and context orchestration for large\-scale AI systems\.

Senior Product Manager at Couchbase, Nov 2024 \- Sep 2025 · 11 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India · Hybrid, Led end\-to\-end product ownership for Vector Search and Hybrid Search within Couchbase Search\. \* Drove improvements in recall, latency, and index efficiency, shaping vector capabilities for large\-scale retrieval workloads\. \* Partnered with enterprise customers to define RAG and multimodal search use cases, influencing roadmap and performance targets\.

Co\-Founder at Digitar AI, Sep 2023 \- Nov 2024 · 1 yr 3 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, Jan 2021 \- Aug 2023 · 2 yrs 8 mos, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, Product manager for Shopping experiences across Bing search & Shop vertical \* Received fast track promotion; experimented and shipped multiple Shopping features across web, shop vertical during my tenure\. \* Capacity champ managing infrastructure spend for an org of 300\+ engineers & data scientists\.

Product Manager II at Microsoft, May 2019 \- Dec 2020 · 1 yr 8 mos, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, \* Received fast track promotion: led the vision and strategy for Purchase Order management system \* Launched new PO change order process benefitting users across 100K\+ purchase orders\. \* Streamlined and automated contract creation/validation for 50K\+ contracts annually\.

Software Engineer at Akamai Technologies, Jun 2014 \- May 2017 · 3 yrs, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, \* Was part of Developer Productivity team, leading the development of a web portal for Bitbucket users to streamline SOX and PCI compliance implementation\. \* Served as a Buildsystem SME, optimizing software builds and reducing wait times for large engineering teams\. \* Proficient in Perforce and Ruby on Rails; streamlined processes around version control for company's codebases\.

## Education

Post Graduate Program in Management \(PGP\), Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Bachelors in Engineering, Information Technology, Ramaiah Institute Of Technology

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/ankush-shankar)

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