Staff Product Manager, Agentic Systems

The Impact You’ll Make

Recursion is leading an era of autonomous science – an adaptable system where AI agents navigate the complexity of biology and chemistry to discover medicines faster and better.

As the Staff Product Manager for Agentic Systems, you will define the technical and scientific capabilities required for our next suite of capabilities. You will sit at the intersection of our massive proprietary data generation engine and our cutting-edge AI models, building the "nervous system" that allows agents to reason, plan, and execute experiments in our automated labs.

This role is not about maintaining a static roadmap; it is about navigating the frontier of a rapidly evolving field. You will partner with engineering leadership to solve a critical challenge: How do we prioritize the next autonomous science capabilities with the most impact on our drug discovery pipeline,  while the definition of "best practices" for AI agents changes monthly? You will balance the need for durable, scalable orchestration infrastructure with the critical need for cycles of experimentation, ensuring we learn fast, validate agent architectures, and avoid cementing solutions before we understand the problem space.

In this role, you will:

• Define the Architecture for Autonomy: Partner with engineering leadership to scope and build the systems that connect our in silico models (the "brain") with our physical automated labs (the "body"), enabling closed-loop, autonomous discovery.
• Drive Hypothesis-Driven Product Development: Lead cycles of experimentation to test different agentic frameworks. You will embrace ambiguity, helping the team decide when to build durable shared services and when to build rapid, throw-away prototypes to learn what works.
• Operate as a Translator: Bridge the gap between "wet lab" realities and "dry lab" possibilities. You will translate the needs of drug discovery programs into technical requirements for agent reasoning, ensuring our systems optimize for information gain rather than just volume.
• Evangelize the "Human-in-the-loop" Evolution: Work with scientific stakeholders to define interfaces where humans review, validate, and shape agent reasoning, ensuring our scientists evolve from "operators" to "architects" of discovery.

The Team You’ll Join 

You will join a cross-functional team of software engineers, data scientists, and AI/ML scientists who build the technical bedrock that enables autonomous science, including agent orchestration, guardrails, and the connectivity between our digital and physical assets. You will collaborate closely with the Discovery teams (the users of these agents), the AI Research teams (who build cutting-edge models), and our automated biology and chemistry lab teams (who generate the data that feeds into the models).

The Experience You’ll Need

• Navigating Ambiguity in Technical Products: 5+ years of product management experience, with a focus on platform, infrastructure, or AI/ML products where the technical solution was not immediately obvious. 
• Experimentation-First Mindset: A proven track record of managing products through rapid prototyping cycles. You understand the difference between "building to last" and "building to learn," and you know when to apply each strategy.
• Technical Fluency in Modern AI: While you don't need to be an engineer, you must be fluent in the concepts of LLMs, agentic workflows, APIs, and modern data infrastructure. You can hold your own in a debate about orchestration architectures.
• Systems Thinking: The ability to visualize complex ecosystems. You can see how a change in a lab protocol impacts an agent's decision-making ability three steps downstream.
• Communication & Influence: Strong written and oral skills to align diverse stakeholders (PhDs in Biology, Robotics Engineers, AI Researchers) around a unified technical vision.

Working Location & Compensation:

This is an office-based, hybrid position at one of our offices in either Salt Lake City, Utah or New York City, New York. Employees are expected to work in the office at least 50% of the time.

At Recursion, we believe that every employee should be compensated fairly. Based on the skill and level of experience required for this role, the estimated current annual base range for this role is $192,200 - $242,600. You will also be eligible for an annual bonus and equity compensation, as well as a comprehensive benefits package. 

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