Senior Product Engineer, Discourse Graphs

We are looking for a senior product engineer to join the Discourse Graphs team, in a fully remote, fixed-term role of 12 to 14 months, paying $120,000 to $215,000 a year depending on experience and location.

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. Its data format has grown into MIRA, an open standard that other tools and AI agents can read.

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 shared queue, and we judge progress by what researchers do with the tools.

Many researchers now do their thinking in a coding agent such as Claude Code, and we want Discourse Graphs to be useful there too. Your first projects will likely come from three uses researchers have started asking for:

• A way for researchers and their coding agents to read and write claims and evidence as the research happens, with the team's whiteboard in view.

• An overlay for manuscripts that shows the claims a draft makes and how well the evidence supports each one.

• A knowledge base for a research institute, built from its publications, notebooks and meeting notes, that a team can question when planning its next steps.

You'll put early versions in front of researchers, and their interest will settle which ones grow. You'll also help make the plugins far easier to start with, so that a new user gets something useful back within minutes of installing one.

You'll work closely with our designer and with a product manager we are hiring at the same time, who keeps one ordered queue of work with the team. You'll turn the most promising ideas on it into prototypes people can try, and carry the ones that earn their place through to something the team can maintain. Technical choices that are cheap to reverse are yours to make, and you'll talk the expensive ones through with our tech lead. We write TypeScript, with a Supabase (Postgres) database, an MCP server and a canvas built on tldraw.

You are drawn to the problem of how research gets documented, connected and built upon, and you have built software that people chose to use. You like going from a conversation with a user to something they can click on within days, with enough design sense to make it pleasant without waiting for a mockup. You use AI coding tools every day and take responsibility for what lands in the repo. You're likely to do well in this role if you have:

• A record of shipping user-facing products from early prototype to something people rely on

• Fluency in TypeScript and a modern front-end stack, and comfort moving between the interface, the data layer and the APIs that join them

• Experience building with large language models, such as agent tools, MCP servers or retrieval over structured data

• A habit of talking with users, and of working alongside designers and other engineers rather than handing work over

Experience with knowledge graphs, research software or a scientific field will help, though none of it is required.

The post is full-time for 12 to 14 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. Everything you build is open source. We'd like you to start as soon as you can. Pay is $120,000 to $215,000 a year, depending on location and experience. 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.

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, building on a real piece of our product, in place of a take-home task. After that you'll talk with the founders about which of the new uses you would build first and how you'd know it was working, and finally we'll ask for two references, from an engineer and from a designer or product manager you have worked with.

Please apply through the form below. Along with your CV, we'll ask for a short note about something you built that changed after you watched people use it, a description of your previous work in this area, and a link to something you built that we can try or read, such as a repository, a prototype or a short demo video. We'll also ask about your availability, and whether you would prefer employment or a contract. We will start reviewing applications on Nov 16. If you have questions about the role, write to [email protected].