Senior Product Manager, Asta

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence•Seattle, WA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

This role sits on Ai2's Strategic Programs team, which also includes Product Management, Design, and Communications. As a team, we help shape Ai2's strategic vision and accelerate execution of its goals. We are a highly collaborative team with a high bar for excellence, who aren't afraid to question how things have been done in the past to propose changes that drive the organization forward. It's a very exciting time to be part of this team as Ai2 plays a unique role in shaping how AI changes the world. 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.

Requirements

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 Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.