AI Research Operations Coordinator

After Thought; Los Angeles (CA); Hybrid; USD 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

Vision and Dental

401(k)

Home Office Benefit

Commuter Benefit

Gym Membership

Wellness Spend

Daily meals

Offsites and Retreats

Job summary

After Thought is hiring a Research Coordinator to streamline open-ended research with structure and pace, supporting senior researchers. You’ll protect creative ambiguity while ensuring progress, keeping the team moving and accountable across documentation and shared tools.

You’ll operate across Notion, Slack, Linear, and Weights & Biases, building processes that reduce cognitive load and foster efficient collaboration in a fast-paced AI research environment.

Qualifications

• Direct experience in a research lab, R&D team, or scientific organization.
• Experience coordinating or managing in academic, scientific, or engineering settings.
• Background driving execution without formal authority.
• Ideal: lab management, research operations, or program coordination in a university, national lab, or frontier tech company.

Responsibilities

• Establish and maintain a healthy operational rhythm across the team.
• Surface blockers early and help resolve them quickly.
• Ensure work stays focused and doesn't drift into distraction.
• Help researchers break ambiguous goals into concrete next steps.
• Track commitments and follow through — with empathy and persistence.
• Create visibility into who's working on what, and what's next.
• Run short, effective daily check-ins (10-15 min per person).
• Synthesize updates across Slack, GitHub, and Notion into clear summaries.
• Connect people with the resources and collaborators they need.
• Maintain and improve our core tools: Linear, GitHub, Notion, Weights & Biases.
• Keep project tracking accurate, up-to-date, and useful — not bureaucratic.
• Enforce process standards across the team and evolve them as we learn.
• Ensure systems reduce cognitive load, not add to it.
• Maintain and improve internally built research tools and shared repositories.
• Keep codebases organized, documented, and accessible to the team.

Skills

Coordination

Communication

Process design

Documentation

Accountability

Education

Bachelor's or higher in technical/science field

Tools

Linear

Notion

Slack

Weights & Biases

Experiment tracking systems

AWS

GCP

GitHub

CI/CD

Job description

After Thought is hiring a Research Coordinator to streamline open-ended research with structure and pace, supporting senior researchers. You’ll protect creative ambiguity while ensuring progress, keeping the team moving and accountable across documentation and shared tools.

You’ll operate across Notion, Slack, Linear, and Weights & Biases, building processes that reduce cognitive load and foster efficient collaboration in a fast-paced AI research environment.