Strategic Project Lead

Plato • San Francisco, CA

7d • $180,000 - $250,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Plato is an applied research lab building foundational infrastructure to train specialized AI agents. It turns real-world data streams into high-fidelity simulated environments that generate training signals for capable models, supporting frontier labs, hyperscalers, and enterprises working on complex, high-stakes AI applications.

The Strategic Project Lead is a hands-on operations role responsible for delivering Plato’s environment and data projects for frontier labs from initial research specification through final delivery. The lead translates research needs into clear project specifications, coordinates engineers and domain experts who build tasks and verifiers, maintains quality, and keeps customers informed and confident. This individual contributor role works directly with research teams at leading AI labs and has a direct line to Plato’s founders. Strong performers may progress to managing multiple projects and leading a team of project leads.

Requirements

• At least 2 years at a top research lab, AI-native startup, or another operationally intense environment, delivering complex projects on time.
• Comfort working directly with senior, technical, and high-profile clients and owning the client relationship.
• Strong analytical skills and clear communication of progress and problems, both in writing and live.
• Enjoys optimizing workflows and managing execution at scale.
• High ownership and responsiveness when projects require it, including evenings and weekends during crunch periods.
• Able to work in person in San Francisco five days per week.

Nice To Haves

• Experience running data, annotation, evaluation, or reinforcement-learning 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 contractor or expert workforces.
• Former founder or early startup employee.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, agents, or evaluation tools.

Responsibilities

• Run projects from customer specification to final delivery; set milestones, track throughput and cost, and meet timelines.
• Serve as the primary day-to-day contact for research teams at leading AI labs, provide transparent reporting, anticipate customer needs, and identify opportunities to expand the work.
• Source, vet, onboard, train, and manage domain experts and contributors who build tasks, environments, and reviews, including ramping large groups on short notice.
• Build review processes, incentives, and workflows to improve quality, throughput, and cost-efficiency.
• Work with engineering and research teams to identify reward hacking, leaky rewards, and brittle verifiers before delivery to the customer.
• Lead daily internal project-health syncs, flag risks early, and turn customer feedback into process and product improvements.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed