Strategic Project Lead (Financial Services)

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

3d•Onsite

About The Position

We’re building the infrastructure that enables frontier AI models to learn how to perform real work across financial services. The company builds fully managed environments and benchmarks that allow leading AI labs to train computer-use and tool-use agents in realistic financial workflows. These environments help AI systems learn tasks across investment banking, private equity, hedge funds, and other financial services — from financial modeling and Excel work to PowerPoint creation and complex analytical workflows. The team works directly with frontier AI labs and is building the next generation of financial-services AI training environments. With a small, highly ambitious team and $8.5M in funding, there is significant opportunity to shape both the product and the operating systems from the ground up as the company scales toward its next stage of growth. This is an unusually high-ownership environment where project leads work across finance, operations, product, engineering, customers, and AI experimentation.

Requirements

1–3 years of professional experience in investment banking, private equity, hedge funds, or top-tier consulting
Strong preference for candidates with 1–2 years of highly analytical finance experience
Must be able to deeply explain the work completed in previous roles
Strong exposure to financial services and financial analysis
Experience reviewing financial models, transaction materials, or client deliverables
Demonstrated ability to independently own projects or workstreams
Experience operating in demanding, high-performance environments
Evidence of taking initiative beyond formally assigned responsibilities
Strong understanding of financial services
Comfortable reviewing financial models and assessing outputs for reasonableness
Strong financial modeling and analytical skills
Ability to understand complex financial workflows and identify errors or inconsistencies
Strong quantitative and structured problem-solving ability
Familiarity with investment banking, private equity, hedge funds, or related financial services workflows
Ability to quickly learn unfamiliar financial processes and domains
Active experimentation with AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, or similar
Genuine curiosity about how AI can improve knowledge work and financial workflows
Comfortable working closely with engineers and technical teams
Ability to translate business and customer requirements into clear product or technical requirements
Strong willingness to learn new technical tools and workflows
Demonstrated self-starter mentality
Entrepreneurial side project, startup experience, business built independently, or another meaningful example of initiative strongly preferred
Experience creating processes or systems from scratch
Comfortable working without established playbooks
Ability to identify problems independently and build practical solutions
Comfortable managing multiple priorities in a rapidly changing environment
Extremely high ownership and agency
Strong bias toward action and execution
Highly organized and operationally rigorous
Excellent written and verbal communication
Comfortable working directly with customers
Strong judgment and attention to detail
Able to operate effectively with significant autonomy
Resourceful and pragmatic
Comfortable moving quickly and adapting to changing priorities
Strong product and business instincts
Naturally curious and eager to experiment
Thrives in a small, high-performance startup environment

Nice To Haves

Experience building or experimenting with AI-powered workflows is a strong plus

Responsibilities

Own day-to-day delivery of training environments and benchmarks shipped to leading AI labs
Manage project execution from requirements through delivery and quality review
Coordinate contractors and other contributors supporting project delivery
Run experiments and evaluate outputs to ensure training environments meet high quality standards
Review financial models, client deliverables, and workflows for accuracy and reasonableness
Identify quality issues and drive them to resolution
Ensure projects move quickly while maintaining a high bar for customer deliverables
Act as a de facto product manager for financial-services training environments
Form strong opinions about product direction and identify opportunities to improve the user experience
Work closely with engineers to define requirements and ship product features
Help shape the product roadmap alongside the engineering team
Translate customer and project requirements into clear technical and operational priorities
Identify recurring patterns and opportunities to build scalable product capabilities
Balance immediate customer needs with longer-term product strategy
Work directly with customers to understand requirements and expectations
Translate customer needs into actionable project requirements
Set clear expectations around timelines, quality, and deliverables
Maintain strong customer relationships throughout project execution
Ensure delivered environments meet customer standards and business objectives
Communicate project status, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to internal and external stakeholders
Create documentation, processes, and quality guardrails from scratch
Develop scalable systems for managing rapid project cycles
Improve workflows that allow the team to execute projects in months rather than years
Establish repeatable quality-control processes
Identify operational bottlenecks and build systems to eliminate them
Help create the infrastructure required to scale the team and project volume
Contribute to pricing and revenue modeling
Evaluate project economics and financial tradeoffs
Help determine the economics and scalability of customer projects
Support broader strategic planning as the company grows
Develop a strong understanding of the relationship between product decisions, customer value, and business outcomes