Senior Product Manager, Discourse Graphs

Astera Institute; Emeryville (CA); Remote; USD 110,000 - 195,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible hours & remote work

Health, vision and dental benefits

Onboarding help from peer product team

Job summary

Astera Institute is seeking a senior product manager for the Discourse Graphs team. This fully remote, fixed-term role (12–18 months) offers a salary between $110,000 and $195,000 per year, with flexibility based on location. The project is open-source, globally distributed, and funded by philanthropy.

You will define strategy, prioritize research-driven work, and guide a small team across time zones. You’ll work with researchers, engineers, and designers to move from async toward regular

Qualifications

• Experience translating user needs into high-level priorities and concrete prototypes.
• Ability to work without a manager and communicate clearly in writing.
• Comfort collaborating with designers and engineers across time zones.

Responsibilities

• Shape product strategy with founders and researchers.
• Prioritize work from researchers and design/engineering teams.
• Create prototypes and written concepts to communicate ideas.
• Operate effectively in a fully remote, distributed team without a traditional PM.

Skills

User research

Stakeholder communication

Prototype iteration

Self-management

Job description

We are looking for a senior product manager to join the Discourse Graphs team, in a fully remote, fixed-term role of 12 to 18 months, paying $110,000 to $195,000 a year depending on where you are based.

Discourse Graphs is an open-source project that helps research teams write down, link and share their questions, claims and evidence, through plugins for Roam Research and Obsidian backed by a shared database. It is philanthropically funded and built by a small team across North America, Europe and India, together with the labs who pilot the tools with us.

What you'll be doing

You’ll join a small and friendly distributed team of engineers, designers and researchers who are designing, building, and testing new ways of doing collaborative science. We do most of our work in writing, across many time zones, and there are no managers: engineers pull their own work from a queue, and we judge progress by what researchers do with the tools rather than by targets. We are moving from asynchronous toward pair programming, short iterations and regular retrospectives.

This role will place you in a central node of a product that is evolving with its researcher user base. We have extensive feedback from internal use as well as two years of user pilots with research labs across North America, more ideas than we can act on, a growing community of labs, and funding to do something with both. You’ll shape the product strategy, working out with the founders where Discourse Graphs should go, what to prioritize, and how to get there.

Some of the questions we are considering include whether the product stays a set of plugins in Obsidian or needs a standalone app now, how it will live in researchers’ existing tools such as agentic coding interfaces, and when we will extend our use cases to adjacent areas like publication overlays and institutional research roadmapping. We’ll follow where users’ interest is strongest, while making sure the work they depend on comes first.

Much of the work is hands‑on, since there is no product team under you. Week to week you’ll talk with the researchers who use the tools, turn what you hear into one ordered queue of work together with the designer and developers, and show your ideas as working prototypes as often as you write them up. You’ll be able to rate priority based on user need and our product vision. Engineers choose their own work from that queue, so we won’t ask you to assign tasks, run sprints or act as a Scrum Master.

About you

You are drawn to the problem of how research gets documented, connected and built upon, and you'd like to spend a year or more making that easier for working scientists. You are comfortable synthesizing diverse user needs and feedback into a set of high‑level priorities and concrete prototypes. Your design instinct centers usability and meeting users within their existing workflows. You like to put something early‑stage in front of people and change course based on what you see, and you are at ease guiding a team as a team member. You're likely to do well in this role if you have:

• Comfort soliciting and navigating user input in context of documented user flows

• A habit of talking with users every week, and of showing ideas as prototypes

• A way of working alongside designers and engineers rather than handing work to them

• Experience working without a manager: noticing what needs doing, taking it on, and keeping others posted in writing

Our offer

The post is full-time for 12 to 18 months, either as a temporary employee of the Astera Institute or on contract at the same annual rate. It is fixed-term because our funding is, and we will be open about where the funding stands for as long as you are with us. It is fully remote, with some overlap with North American working hours, and you can also work in person at Astera in Emeryville, California. We'd like you to start as soon as you can. Pay is $110,000 to $195,000 a year, depending on where you are based. We also offer:

• A flexible approach to working hours and remote working

• Astera-sponsored health, vision and dental benefits for employees

• Onboarding help from peer product teams

We are an equal opportunity employer and are invested in fostering a culture where everyone can thrive. We are committed to equity and inclusion, and we encourage women, people of color, LGBTQIA individuals, people with disabilities, members of ethnic minorities, foreign‑born residents, older members of society, and others from minority communities and diverse backgrounds to apply.

How we hire

We start with a 30‑minute call to get to know each other, with the last ten minutes for your questions. Next is a working session of up to 90 minutes with two of us on a real piece of our product work, in place of a take‑home task. After that you’ll talk with the founders about where you think the product should go, and finally we’ll ask for two references, from an engineer and a designer you have worked with.

If you have questions about the role, write to [e-mail].