Strategic Project LeadThe RoleA great environment is only as good as its delivery.
Strategic Project Lead is a hands-on operations role. You will own Plato's environment and data projects for frontier labs from start to finish: turning a lab's research needs into a clear spec, coordinating the engineers and domain experts who build the tasks and verifiers, holding the quality bar, and keeping the customer informed and confident at every step. The trust you build with each lab is what drives Plato's next project with them.
What You'll Do- Own Delivery: Run projects from customer spec to final delivery. Set milestones, track throughput and cost, and hit timelines that often move fast.
- Manage Lab Relationships: Serve as the primary day-to-day contact for research teams at leading AI labs. Provide consistent, transparent reporting, anticipate what they need next, and spot opportunities to expand the work.
- Coordinate Experts at Scale: Source, vet, onboard, train and manage the domain experts and contributors who build tasks, environments and reviews, sometimes ramping large groups on a few days' notice.
- Hold the Quality Bar: Build the review processes, incentives and workflows that raise quality, throughput and cost-efficiency. Work with engineering and research to catch reward hacking, leaky rewards and brittle verifiers before the customer does.
- Run the Daily Rhythm: Lead daily internal syncs on project health, flag risks early, and turn customer feedback into better process and product.
Required Qualifications- Track Record: 2 + years at a top research lab, or AI native startup company or another operationally intense environment, with complex projects delivered on time.
- Client Presence: Comfortable working directly with senior, technical and high-profile clients and owning the relationship.
- Analytical and Clear: Strong analytical skills, and you communicate progress and problems plainly, in writing and live.
- Process Builder: You enjoy optimizing workflows and running execution at scale.
- High Ownership: You stay responsive when a project needs it, including evenings and weekends during crunch periods.
- Bay Area Based: Able to work in person in San Francisco 5x a week (financial district)
Preferred Qualifications- Experience running data, annotation, evaluation or RL environment projects for AI labs, at an AI data company or inside a lab.
- A technical degree, or comfort with Python, SQL and how models are trained and evaluated.
- Experience managing large distributed contractors or expert workforces.
- Former founder or early startup employee.
- Hands-on experience with LLMs, agents or evaluation tools.
