Strategic Project Lead

Plato • San Francisco, CA

5d • Onsite

About The Position

Plato is an applied research lab building infrastructure for training specialized AI agents. It transforms real-world data streams into simulated environments that provide training signals for capable models, supporting frontier labs, hyperscalers, and enterprises. The Strategic Project Lead is a hands-on operations role responsible for delivering environment and data projects for frontier labs from start to finish. The role 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. The position begins as an individual-contributor role, with growth opportunities for strong performers to run multiple projects and lead a team of project leads.

Requirements

• At least 2 years at a top research lab, AI-native startup, or another operationally intense environment, with a record of 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.
• Enjoy optimizing workflows and running 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 a 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 through 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 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.
• Develop 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 translate customer feedback into process and product improvements.

Benefits

• Opportunity to work directly with research teams at leading AI labs.
• End-to-end project ownership and a direct line to the founders.
• Growth opportunity to take on multiple projects and lead a team of project leads.

What This Job Offers

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