Research Technical Program Manager

AfterQuery; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Medical

Vision

Dental

401(k) With Employer Match

Daily Meals

UberEats Stipend

Wellness Stipend

Equinox Membership

Commute Covered

Job summary

AfterQuery is an applied research lab based in San Francisco that curates data solutions for foundation model development. We enable access to expertise and data to power the best models, serving frontier AI labs worldwide with ambitious research programs.

Your job is to make ambitious research programs move by turning open-ended goals into clear plans, aligning researchers, engineers, SPLs, and partners, and surfacing critical blockers to ship high-quality work faster.

Qualifications

• 2-4 years project/program management experience.
• Experience leading complex technical programs across research, machine learning, engineering, or data organizations.
• Working knowledge of the LLM development lifecycle, including data creation, SFT, RL-based post-training, and evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Own planning and execution across post-training, enterprise post-training, fellowship, and public evaluation programs.
• Translate ambiguous research objectives into milestones, owners, dependencies, success criteria, and decision points.
• Maintain a trustworthy view of program health, including experiment progress, risks, blockers, partner dependencies, and upcoming releases.

Skills

Project/Program management

Technical program leadership

ML lifecycle knowledge

Communication

Job description

About AfterQueryAfterQuery is an applied research lab curating data solutions for foundation model development.We serve every frontier AI lab with the mission of delivering the best data to power the best models. In doing so, we can make expertise that once took a lifetime to build available to anyone who needs it. Our customers are the ones building the foundation models themselves and our work sits directly in the loop of how those systems improve.This is a rare opportunity to join a company at a defining moment in AI. Since raising our $30M Series A at a $300M valuation, AfterQuery has grown well over a $100M revenue run rate.We're based in San Francisco and backed by leading investors including Altos Ventures, BoxGroup, and Y Combinator and angels from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Microsoft AI.

Why ApplyMassive Opportunity:

We are one of the fastest-growing YC companies in our batch, and we believe we can become one of the fastest-growing YC companies of all time.

Founding Impact:

You will own and architect core infrastructure systems that power our platform from the ground up.

Equity & Growth:

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. As we scale, you'll have the opportunity to shape the engineering organization and lead major technical initiatives.

Strong Team:

Our founding team has experience from Citadel Securities, Meta, Google, Silver Lake, and Morgan Stanley - work alongside world-class engineers and researchers.

Overview

Your job is to make ambitious research programs move. You will own the execution of programs spanning post-training, enterprise post-training, fellowships, evaluation releases, and partner research. You will turn open-ended research goals into clear plans, keep researchers, engineers, SPLs and external partners aligned, and surface the decisions and blockers that matter. This is not a traditional project-management role. You must understand the technical work well enough to reason about experiments, datasets, evaluations, training pipelines, and research tradeoffs. Your impact will come from creating just enough structure for the team to run more programs, make better decisions, and ship high-quality work faster.

Responsibilities

Own planning and execution across post-training, enterprise post-training, fellowship, and public evaluation programs. Translate ambiguous research objectives into milestones, owners, dependencies, success criteria, and decision points. Maintain a trustworthy view of program health, including experiment progress, risks, blockers, partner dependencies, and upcoming releases.

Required Qualifications

2-4 years project/program management experience. Experience leading complex technical programs across research, machine learning, engineering, or data organizations. Working knowledge of the LLM development lifecycle, including data creation, SFT, RL-based post-training, and evaluation. Strong communication and an ability to turn messy technical information into clear decisions and next steps

Company Benefits (For Eligible Employees):

Health InsuranceMedical, Vision, Dental401(k)With Employer MatchDaily MealsDaily UberEats StipendWellness StipendMonthly - Covers Equinox MembershipCommute Covered

We are an equal opportunity employer committed to providing a workplace free from discrimination and harassment. Employment decisions are made without regard to legally protected characteristics under applicable federal, state, or local law. We comply with applicable pay transparency requirements and provide compensation ranges based on the position, qualifications, experience, and other relevant factors. Reasonable accommodations are available to qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs, as required by law.

This job description is intended to describe the general nature and level of work performed and is not an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, qualifications, or working conditions associated with the position. We reserve the right to modify this job description as business needs change.