Senior Product Manager, Asta

The Allen Institute for AI

$115K — $173K *
Enterprise Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree with 5-8+ years in product management for developer or research-facing products.
  • Proven ability to convert ambiguous research needs into concrete engineering specifications.
  • Experience working closely with engineering teams on technical platforms, focusing on daily operations.
  • Genuine interest in AI research and its applications in scientific discovery, with ability to learn quickly.
  • Familiarity with compliance and regulations in product development, especially regarding data privacy.
  • Strong written communication skills for effective documentation and stakeholder engagement.
  • Proficient at managing relationships and navigating disagreements among teams.

Responsibilities

  • Define engineering requirements by collaborating with researchers to understand their workflows.
  • Articulate trade-offs to guide priorities and investment decisions for maximum impact.
  • Build and sequence the product roadmap for Asta's agentic framework and supporting tools.
  • Create feedback loops between engineering and research to ensure continuous alignment and responsiveness.
  • Drive adoption of Asta's tools among internal researchers to enhance platform utilization.
  • Manage and track progress across Asta engineering workstreams, ensuring alignment on priorities.
  • Oversee the Semantic Scholar platform and its reliability while implementing new features.

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision coverage for team members and their families.
  • Health savings account and flexible spending accounts for healthcare and dependent care.
  • 401k plan enrollment available for retirement savings.
  • Monthly stipends for commuting/internet and fitness/wellbeing expenses.
  • Generous leave policies including sick days, personal days, vacation days, and paid holidays.
  • Eligibility for annual bonuses and long-term incentive plans.
Full Job Description
Persons in these roles are expected to work from our offices in Seattle. On-site requirements vary based on position and team. If you have questions about on-site work arrangements for this role, please ask your recruiter.
Our base salary range is $115,920 - $173,880, and in addition we have generous bonus plans to provide a competitive compensation package.

Who You Are:

You think like a builder and an advocate at the same time. You can sit with a researcher who's pursuing a novel method and hasn't yet found the words to describe what they need, and translate that into engineering requirements that an engineering team can actually build against. You're comfortable operating at the intersection of infrastructure and science: you don't need to be an ML researcher, but you're genuinely curious about how researchers work, what agentic frameworks make possible, and where the current tooling gets in their way. You know how to turn a fuzzy, ambitious mission into a tactical roadmap with sequenced milestones and clear ownership. You hold a high bar for the experiences and tools already in the hands of our users, because internal researchers and the broader community depend on them being fast, reliable, and compliant, even while you're pushing the frontier of what's next.

Your Next Challenge:

You will own the engineering and data frameworks of Asta, Ai2's platform for building agents that advance scientific research. Your users are the researchers and engineers who build on Asta; Ai2's own research teams and the broader AI-for-science community. Your primary partner will be the Agentic Frameworks and Data engineering team. You'll be one of the first product minds shaping what an agentic platform for science actually looks like. There's no existing playbook to inherit, so you have the opportunity to define engineering requirements grounded in real researcher workflows, build the roadmap for Asta's agentic framework and its supporting tools, and run the feedback loop that keeps engineering and research in continuous conversation. You'll also own the Semantic Scholar data platform end to end; a knowledge graph of 100M+ papers, and the public APIs that power Asta and science agents. You'll keep these resources reliable for the millions who depend on it and continue building them into the highest-quality open literature resource in the field.

In This Role, You Will:
  • Define Asta engineering requirements by working directly with Ai2 researchers to understand their workflows, translating what you learn into clear, prioritized specifications for the Agentic Frameworks engineering team.
  • Help articulate trade offs to help guide the team towards the highest impact priorities and investments.
  • Build and sequence the roadmap for Asta's agentic framework and its supporting tools, so that new tools and capabilities compound toward unlocking real scientific advancements.
  • Create and run a continuous feedback loop between engineering and research, so that researchers' needs surface early and shape the roadmap, and so that new capabilities get back in front of researchers quickly.
  • Drive adoption of Asta's tools among Ai2's own researchers, so that our internal science runs on the platform we ship to the world.
  • Project manage and drive execution across Asta engineering workstreams: track progress against the roadmap, unblock dependencies, and keep engineering and research aligned on priorities and tradeoffs.
  • Own the Semantic Scholar platform end to end: data platform and public APIs. Balancing reliability for millions of users with the roadmap to rebuild the platform.
  • Own Ai2's benchmarking strategy for scientific agents: set the direction for AstaBench, our public benchmark suite, and define which evaluations Ai2 standardizes on internally, with partners, and for the broader AI research community
  • Own regulatory and governance compliance for these products, including data subject rights such as right to access and right to be forgotten, partnering with legal as needed.
  • Represent the researcher and developer perspective in engineering planning, and represent engineering constraints and tradeoffs back to research and leadership.
  • Contribute to how Ai2 does product management as a discipline, given this is a growing function within the Strategic Programs team.

What You'll Need:
  • Bachelor's degree and 5-8+ years of product management experience, including shipping developer-facing or research-facing products such as APIs, platforms, or tools built for technical users.
  • Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous, research-driven needs into concrete engineering requirements and a sequenced roadmap.
  • Experience partnering closely with an engineering team on a technical platform, including day-to-day prioritization and execution, not just quarterly planning.
  • Genuine interest in AI research, agentic systems, and their application to scientific discovery, with the ability to learn a technical domain quickly.
  • Comfort owning compliance-related product requirements (e.g., data access, deletion, and privacy regulations) and translating them into engineering work.
  • Strong written communication - you can write a requirements doc, a roadmap update, and a risk escalation that people actually read and act on.
  • Excellent stakeholder management across research and engineering, including with senior leaders, and comfort navigating disagreement to a decision.
  • Comfort operating with ambiguity and building product processes where none exist yet, while knowing which processes are worth the overhead.

Nice To Have:
  • Direct experience with agent frameworks, LLM tooling, or orchestration platforms (e.g., agent harnesses, evaluation frameworks).
  • Experience building or maintaining public-facing developer products, such as APIs or benchmarks used by an external research community.
  • Familiarity with data privacy and governance regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) and what they require of a product.
  • Experience in a research organization, national lab, or academic environment, where timelines and incentives differ from a typical product company.

Physical Demands and Work Environment:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by a team member to successfully perform the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the functions.
  • Must be able to remain in a stationary position for long periods of time.
  • The ability to communicate information and ideas so others will understand. Must be able to exchange accurate information in these situations.
  • The ability to observe details at close range.
  • Can work under deadlines.

Benefits:
  • Team members and their families are covered by medical, dental, vision, and an employee assistance program.
  • Team members are able to enroll in our health savings account plan, our healthcare reimbursement arrangement plan, and our health care and dependent care flexible spending account plans.
  • Team members are able to enroll in our company's 401k plan.
  • Team members will receive $125 per month to assist with commuting or internet expenses and will also receive $200 per month for fitness and wellbeing expenses.
  • Team members will also receive up to ten sick days per year, up to seven personal days per year, up to 20 vacation days per year and twelve paid holidays throughout the calendar year.
  • Team members will be able to receive annual bonuses and can participate in the long-term incentive plan.


Note: This job description in no way states or implies that these are the only duties to be performed by the team members(s) of this position. Team members will be required to follow any other job-related instructions and to perform any other job-related duties requested by any person authorized to give instructions or assignments. All duties and responsibilities are essential functions and requirements and are subject to possible modification to reasonably accommodate individuals with disabilities. To perform this job successfully, the team member(s) will possess the skills, aptitudes, and abilities to perform each duty proficiently. Some requirements may exclude individuals who pose a direct threat or significant risk to the health or safety of themselves or others. The requirements listed in this document are the minimum levels of knowledge, skills, or abilities. This document does not create an employment contract, implied or otherwise, other than an at will relationship.

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