Research Product Manager AP Intelligence

The Associated Press is an independent global news organization dedicated to factual reporting. Founded in 1846, AP remains the most trusted source of fast, accurate, unbiased news in all formats and the essential provider of technology and services vital to the news business. AP Intelligence is building a new intelligence layer on top of AP’s global reporting—transforming verified journalism into structured facts, events, entities, relationships, and signals that machines and people can use in real time.

About the role

We are seeking an intellectually curious, highly analytical Research Product Manager to lead research and product definition for emerging AP Intelligence capabilities. This is a 0→1 individual contributor role focused on turning broad questions into structured hypotheses, research plans, and experiments. You will investigate ambiguous product questions using data, customer conversations, and lightweight prototypes, then translate findings into clear product decisions and requirements. The role does not have direct reports initially but offers significant ownership and visibility.

Responsibilities

• Lead research into ambiguous product questions across event intelligence, structured news data, knowledge graphs, real-time information, and AI systems. Turn questions like “What makes an event important?” or “How should we measure whether a signal is reliable and useful?” into hypotheses, experiments, and evaluation frameworks.
• Work hands-on with AP datasets and product outputs using tools such as SQL, Python, notebooks, LLMs, and lightweight prototypes to test ideas.
• Design benchmarks and evaluation methods for dimensions such as accuracy, timeliness, confidence, relevance, and usefulness. Identify patterns that can become scalable schemas, taxonomies, scoring systems, and product capabilities.
• Translate research into clear product concepts, requirements, and recommendations for engineering teams. Define how concepts like event importance, impact, velocity, provenance, and confidence become useful AP Intelligence capabilities.
• Partner with engineering and applied AI teams to identify failure modes, improve product quality, and move promising ideas from prototype to production. Use evidence to recommend which ideas should advance, change, or stop.
• Work directly with prospective customers and design partners to understand workflows, test emerging concepts, and determine where AP Intelligence creates meaningful value.
• Assess whether a capability is technically possible, whether customers will integrate it, rely on it, and pay for it.
• Partner closely with journalists, engineers, AI teams, commercial teams, and senior leaders. Synthesize editorial, technical, customer, and commercial perspectives into clear decisions and communicate complex ideas to technical and nontechnical audiences.

Requirements

• 6+ years of relevant professional experience, including significant experience in product management, data products, AI/ML products, applied research, search/information systems, or another highly analytical product environment.
• A strong track record of taking ambiguous problems and independently turning them into structured questions, experiments, and product recommendations.
• Exceptional analytical and conceptual thinking, with an ability to find patterns in complex information and develop clear points of view from incomplete evidence.
• Strong technical and data fluency. Comfort exploring datasets, interrogating outputs, and building lightweight analyses or prototypes (no production engineering required).
• Familiarity with structured or semi-structured data and areas such as APIs, taxonomies, ontologies, knowledge graphs, search, retrieval, or related information systems.
• Working knowledge of modern AI systems and concepts, including LLMs, RAG, embeddings, information retrieval, structured outputs, and model evaluation.
• Strong product and customer judgment, including the ability to distinguish an interesting research problem from a capability customers will use and value.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and comfort working across engineering, AI, journalism, commercial teams, and senior leadership.
• Experience with AI/ML products, knowledge graphs, search/retrieval, real-time or event-driven data, intelligence platforms, AI evaluation, financial/risk/geopolitical information products, or early-stage 0→1 environments is especially relevant but not required.

What Success Looks Like

In your first year, you will have:

• Turned important unanswered AP Intelligence questions into rigorous product investigations and clear recommendations.
• Established benchmarks and evaluation frameworks for emerging capabilities.
• Helped define and validate new event, signal, and intelligence capabilities from research through product definition.
• Influenced the AP Intelligence roadmap through evidence from data, customers, and experimentation.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Retirement benefits.
• Company-paid life insurance.
• Paid vacation and sick days.
• Paid parental leave.
• Mental well-being resources.

Pay

The anticipated salary range is $140,000–$185,000, based on a candidate’s skills, qualifications, and location.

Schedule

This role may be based in New York, NY or remotely within the United States.