astera - Senior Product Engineer, Discourse Graphs

• 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.