Applied AI Research Program Manager

Percepta; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401(k) matching

Health benefits

Lunch provided

Job summary

Percepta’s research organization is seeking a Technical Program Manager to orchestrate four parallel tracks—world modeling, forecasting, user modeling, and optimization—ensuring milestones, dependencies, and commitments stay aligned with leadership and customer teams.

You will balance shared compute, data access, and research engineering time, coordinating across researchers, engineers, and product managers to ship outcomes while maintaining disciplined governance.

Qualifications

• Have prior experience as a program or technical program manager (TPM) supporting a research, ML, or other deeply technical organization with multiple parallel work streams.
• Are comfortable reading and reasoning about technical research content well enough to track dependencies and risk, without needing to do the research yourself or set its direction.
• Default to operational rigor: you build the tracker before someone asks for it, and you notice the dependency before it's blocking.
• Are an excellent communicator who can translate status and risk between research leads, engineers, product managers, and non-technical stakeholders.
• Are comfortable with ambiguity — this org and its processes are young, and you'll be building some of the operating model as you go, not inheriting a finished playbook.
• Have a proven track record of keeping complex, multi-team technical work on track and shipping, measured by outcomes rather than activity.
• Enjoy extreme ownership of the org's operational health, even when the underlying research isn't yours to direct.

Responsibilities

• Own the operating rhythm of the research org: roadmap tracking, milestone check-ins, status reporting, and the recurring rituals that keep four research tracks legible to each other and to leadership.
• Track dependencies across the four research tracks (e.g. a forecaster waiting on a world model, an optimizer waiting on a user model) and surface them proactively, rather than letting them surface late.
• Manage allocation of shared infrastructure — compute, data access, and research engineering time across competing priorities, and elevate trade-offs rather than resolve them unilaterally.
• Maintain a single, accurate view of commitments: what's been promised to customer-facing teams, what the research org has committed to shipping, and progress against both.
• Coordinate the mechanics of getting research to external output where applicable — timelines, internal review, compliance — without owning the research content itself.
• Build and maintain the systems (trackers, docs, dashboards) that let a fast-growing, deeply technical research team stay organized without adding process for its own sake.
• Act as the connective tissue between Research Leads, Embedded Product Managers, and Applied AI Engineers by making sure the right people have the right information to make them.

Skills

Program management

Technical program management

Communicator

Dependency tracking

Operational ownership

Cross-team coordination

Ambiguity tolerance

Job description

Percepta’s research organization is seeking a Technical Program Manager to orchestrate four parallel tracks—world modeling, forecasting, user modeling, and optimization—ensuring milestones, dependencies, and commitments stay aligned with leadership and customer teams.

You will balance shared compute, data access, and research engineering time, coordinating across researchers, engineers, and product managers to ship outcomes while maintaining disciplined governance.