Role Overview
Epoch AI is looking for a Product Manager for our website, the place where most people encounter our research. You'll decide what gets built and make sure it ships well.
About the role
The website is Epoch's main product. We’re looking for someone to be responsible for what we build, what each page is for, what gets done first, and whether it's ready to go out.
Much of the job is holding the context that individual researchers do not: what our publications and data products have in common, how they relate to each other, and how we want people to use the site. You will also own the parts of the site that cut across several pieces of research, such as topic pages and the navigation.
You'd work most closely with three teams. The senior product designer and the design team turn specs into designs and own the visuals. Web developers build them. The comms team owns the writing: publications, social media, and SEO. How reports and data insights look and how they sit on the site is yours.
You’ll report directly to our COO, as does the senior product designer. For now, this is an individual contributor role without direct reports.
This role is fully remote, and we can offer contracts in many countries, though we require at least three hours of overlap in work hours with Pacific Time. We invite anyone who is interested to apply, regardless of background, experience, or credentials. Please do not include a cover letter, photograph, or headshot of yourself, or any personal information that is not relevant to the role for which you're applying (including marital status, age, identity traits, etc.). Applications are rolling.
Responsibilities
- Set the goals and specs for each new page or feature with the researcher and the designer: who it is for, what it should do, what goes on it and roughly in what order.
- Prioritize across the whole site, with the audience and usability in mind, and say no or not yet when a request does not fit.
- Set the standards every new page follows (layout, how filters and charts work, what we call things), and decide what the shared parts of the site are for, such as who the homepage serves and what they should find there in ten seconds.
- Run projects from goal to launch: agree the goal and spec before design starts, get the people who will use the page to review the design before it is built, make sure developers have what they need, and decide when it ships.
- Give feedback on designs as they come, and answer designers' and developers' questions, or find the researcher who can.
- Know the audience: use analytics, the feedback form and interviews with our user panel to decide what to build and what to cut.
- Own QA: click through every page before it goes live and catch broken tiles, mismatched titles and menu labels, and buttons that do not do what they say, before readers do.
Requirements
What we're looking for
- Strong product taste: you can tell what our audience will find clear and what they will find cluttered or confusing before the analytics tell you, you know what to leave out, and you can explain why.
- Clear writing: most of this job is one-page briefs, decision notes and Slack messages that busy researchers will actually read.
- Comfort with data, charts and research: you can read a scatter plot and say what the point is, notice when a number is meaningless without context, and get up to speed on a research area fast enough to ask the right questions.
- An understanding of our audience (policy people, journalists, researchers and people at AI labs) and how they differ from us.
- Experience shipping web products with designers and developers, and a sense of where projects usually go wrong.
- People skills: sometimes you'll need to tell a senior researcher that their feature is not getting built this quarter, explain why, and keep working well with them, and to change the plan when their argument is better than yours.
- Organization: you keep track of what was decided and by whom, and you follow up.
- Ability to travel: attendance at our three annual team retreats is expected for all staff.
Nice to have
- Familiarity with Epoch's research, or with AI more broadly.
- Prior product management experience, in tech, on a website, or at a research organization or newsroom.
- Enough front-end knowledge to have a sensible conversation with developers about what is easy and what is hard.
- Comfort with AI coding tools. Our researchers and developers use Claude to change the site directly, and part of this job is keeping that fast without the site becoming incoherent.
If you don't tick all these boxes but think you would be a great fit, please consider applying anyway!