Research Program Manager

Percepta•New York, NY

20h•$180,000 - $400,000•Onsite

About The Position

Percepta’s research organization runs four parallel tracks: world modeling, forecasting, user modeling, and optimization. This role operates the systems and processes that help those tracks coordinate, track research progress, manage shared resources, and meet commitments to research leadership and customer-facing teams. The role supports the research organization’s operations without directing or owning the research itself. The Research Program Manager establishes the organization’s operating rhythm, tracks interdependencies and risks, maintains an accurate view of commitments and progress, and coordinates external research outputs where applicable. The role also builds practical trackers, documentation, and dashboards for a fast-growing, deeply technical team, and connects Research Leads, Embedded Product Managers, and Applied AI Engineers. Percepta is an applied AI company and a direct partnership with General Catalyst. It embeds with industry-leading customers to drive AI transformation and brings together engineering, product, and research expertise with its in-house Mosaic toolkit and strategic partners. The company describes itself as office-first, valuing in-person collaboration while focusing on outcomes. Its culture emphasizes autonomy, trust, customer outcomes, high-agency decision-making, and intensity with kindness.

Requirements

Prior experience as a program manager or technical program manager supporting a research, machine learning, or other deeply technical organization with multiple parallel work streams.
Ability to read and reason about technical research content sufficiently to track dependencies and risk, without conducting the research or setting its direction.
Strong operational rigor, including proactively creating tracking systems and identifying dependencies before they become blockers.
Excellent communication skills and ability to translate status and risk among research leads, engineers, product managers, and non-technical stakeholders.
Comfort with ambiguity and building an operating model and processes in a young organization.
A proven track record of keeping complex, multi-team technical work on track and shipping, measured by outcomes rather than activity.
Willingness to take ownership of the organization’s operational health without directing the underlying research.

Responsibilities

Own the research organization’s operating rhythm, including roadmap tracking, milestone check-ins, status reporting, and recurring coordination rituals.
Track dependencies across the four research tracks and proactively surface them.
Manage allocation of shared infrastructure, including compute, data access, and research engineering time, and escalate trade-offs rather than resolving them unilaterally.
Maintain an accurate view of commitments to customer-facing teams and commitments to ship, including progress against both.
Coordinate timelines, internal review, and compliance for external research outputs where applicable, without owning the research content.
Build and maintain trackers, documentation, and dashboards that help the technical research team stay organized without unnecessary process.
Connect Research Leads, Embedded Product Managers, and Applied AI Engineers by ensuring relevant people have the information they need.