Who We Are:
We are a small team at the Allen Institute for AI building OlmoEarth, an open, end-to-end platform built around our family of foundation models for Earth observation. The platform enables users to create custom fine-tuned models to detect and classify novel geospatial features, and it handles the full loop: imagery acquisition from Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Landsat; annotation; distributed training and inference; and a viewer so the outputs are usable by people who aren't ML experts.
Our partners are working on wildfire risk, food security, climate resilience, and conservation, and today include NASA JPL, IFPRI (crop mapping in Kenya), Global Mangrove Watch, and the Amazon Conservation Alliance. Engineering, ML research, and Product & Partnerships all sit and work together on it. Read more at https://allenai.org/olmoearth.
You would be our first dedicated product manager on OlmoEarth. The platform works, the partners are real, the research behind it is world class, and there is a lot of room to shape where this goes next. You would help us sharpen who we are building for and where the platform fits, and lead the work of finding and proving our product-market fit. It is a rare opportunity and it should be both a lot of fun and deeply rewarding work.
Your Next Challenge:
We're a deeply mission-driven team. The point of OlmoEarth is to help our partners do more for conservation and the environment than they could on their own, and that is what the product work is in service of. We're looking for a genuine partner to the team: someone who will dig into the market and our users alongside us, help us work out which partners and use cases we should prioritize, and help the whole team find focus.
- Work with the program lead and partner development team to shape and implement the adoption strategy.
- Get close to how partners actually use the platform. You will watch real usage, sit with users, and understand how we can support their missions.
- Build a real picture of the partner landscape: which organizations are doing work where OlmoEarth could make the biggest difference, what they rely on today, and what stands between them and getting value out of the platform. As a non-profit we aren't chasing revenue or market share, which puts us in a great position to go looking for wherever the impact is largest.
- Turn that into focus. Driving prioritization, saying no, owning the roadmap, and defending it in a room full of smart people who will push back.
- Own adoption targets and the metrics behind them, including helping us define what we should be measuring in the first place.
You will do this across research, engineering, and partnerships, and up and down the organization. A lot of the work is bringing people with different incentives to a shared answer about what we are building and why.
What we believe
The mission is the point. We're building AI for the planet: environmental conservation, food security, climate. If it's important to you to work on problems with a positive impact on the world, you're in the right place.
The person closest to the user makes the best decisions. We put weight on talking to users, sitting with partnerships, and working side by side with researchers. This team travels regularly to meet the people using what we build.
Iterate small. Our users are tackling huge problems. The fastest way to build tools that genuinely help is to design alongside them: ship something functional, learn from how they use it, and iterate.
We ship high-quality work quickly, and we learn fast from mistakes. We hold a high bar and we move with urgency. When something breaks, we focus on understanding the system, not blaming individuals.
In-person matters. A lot of the best work here happens in unscheduled hallway conversations between engineering, research, and partnerships. We're in the office most days because that's where the team is at its best.
We hire for curiosity. The technologies and the market will change. The people who do well here enjoy learning, and don't rely on a memorized playbook.
Ideas get better when they're challenged. We make decisions by talking them through: asking questions, pushing back when something doesn't add up, and being open to changing our minds. Everyone here is still learning, and we like it that way.
What You’ll Need:
Required qualifications
- 7+ years of product management experience at technology product companies.
- Experience at small or growth-stage companies, where you have owned outcomes end to end without heavy process scaffolding.
- You know how to test product-market fit rather than assert it. You can describe specific times you designed a validation, ran it, and changed direction based on what came back, including deciding that a promising segment wasn't worth pursuing.
- Experience shipping technically deep, data-heavy products in close partnership with research and engineering teams. You can hold your own in a modeling or infrastructure discussion, ask good questions, and translate the tradeoffs for people who can't.
- Demonstrated ability to drive prioritization and focus on a team that serves many stakeholders.
- Strong written communication. You write clear product plans and decision docs, give and receive direct feedback, and can guide stakeholders through detail without losing them.
- Comfort working across levels, from an individual analyst using the platform to a partner organization's leadership.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with products where AI or ML output is the core value, and where communicating model behavior and uncertainty to non-experts is part of the product problem.
- Experience selling into or building for mission-driven users: NGOs, government agencies, research institutions, or the public sector.
- You're using modern AI tooling and agentic workflows to move faster and to rethink how product work gets done.
- A visible track record of thinking in public: technical writing, talks, open-source involvement, sustained side projects.
- Open to occasional international travel to meet directly with the people using what we build.
Problems you'd pick up early
- Deciding where to bet. We have partners across wildfire risk, crop mapping, mangrove monitoring, and forest conservation. They have real overlap and real divergence. Working out which shared platform capabilities unlock the most impact, and which requests are one-offs we should decline, is an open question.
- Getting from expert-usable to self-serve. Today the full loop from raw data to a fine-tuned, evaluated, production-ready model works, and it works best with us in the room. Closing that gap is the central product problem.
- Defining what adoption means here. We don't have revenue as a scoreboard. You will build the measurement framework that tells us whether OlmoEarth is actually being used to do consequential work, and you will use it to change what we build.
- Agentic model development. We're pushing into agents that help with dataset discovery, preparation, and augmentation, and agents that explore model configurations to find the right setup for a use case. Shaping what that should feel like for a non-ML user is wide open.
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.
A Little More About Ai2:
Ai2 is a Seattle based non-profit AI research institute founded in 2014 by the late Paul Allen. Our mission is building breakthrough AI to solve the world’s biggest problems. We develop foundational AI research and innovation to deliver real-world impact through large-scale open models, data, robotics, conservation, and beyond.
In addition to Ai2’s core mission, we also aim to contribute to humanity through our treatment of each member of the Ai2 Team. Some highlights are:
- We are a learning organization – because everything Ai2 does is ground-breaking, we are learning every day. Similarly, through weekly Ai2 Academy lectures, a wide variety of world-class AI experts as guest speakers, and our commitment to your personal on-going education, Ai2 is a place where you will have opportunities to continue learning alongside your coworkers.
- We value diversity - We seek to hire, support, and promote people from all genders, ethnicities, and all levels of experience regardless of age. We particularly encourage applications from women, non-binary individuals, people of color, members of the LGBTQA+ community, and people with disabilities of any kind.
- We value inclusion - We understand the value that people's individual experiences and perspectives can bring to an organization, and we are building a culture in which all voices are heard, respected and considered.
- We emphasize a healthy work/life balance – we believe our team members are happiest and most productive when their work/life balance is optimized. While we value powerful research results which drive our mission forward, we also value dinner with family, weekend time, and vacation time. We offer generous paid vacation and sick leave as well as family leave.
- We are collaborative and transparent – we consider ourselves a team, all moving with a common purpose. We are quick to cheer our successes, and even quicker to share and jointly problem solve our failures.
- We are in Seattle – and our office is on the water! We have mountains, we have lakes, we have four seasons, we bike to work, we have a vibrant theater scene, and we have so much else. We even have kayaks for you to paddle right outside our front door. We welcome interest from applicants from outside of the United States.
- We are friendly– chances are you will like every one of the 200+ (and growing) people who work here. We do.
Ai2 is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. You may view the related Know Your Rights compliance poster and the Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision by clicking on their corresponding links.
This employer participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S. If E-Verify cannot confirm that you are authorized to work, this employer is required to give you written instructions and an opportunity to contact the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or Social Security Administration (SSA) so you can begin to resolve the issue before the employer can take any action against you, including terminating your employment. Employers can only use E-Verify once you have accepted a job offer and completed the Form I-9.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to employees and applicants with disabilities to the full extent required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). If you feel you need a reasonable accommodation pursuant to the ADA, you are encouraged to contact us at recruiting@allenai.org.
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.