SF-Based Strategic Project Lead for AI Lab Delivery

Plato; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Plato is seeking a Strategic Project Lead to own cross‑lab environment and data projects from spec to delivery. You will coordinate engineers and researchers, manage quality, and maintain confidence with frontier labs.

You’ll work closely with labs to ensure timelines, budgets, and success criteria are met in a high‑stakes setting. Based in San Francisco, you will lead relationships with top AI labs, shape project scope, and scale coordination across experts and reviews to drive Plato’s next

Qualifications

• Track record: 2+ years at a top research lab, or AI native startup, or another operation‑intense environment with complex projects delivered on time.
• Client presence: comfortable working directly with senior, technical and high‑profile clients and owning the relationship.
• Analytical and clear: strong analytical skills, and you communicate progress and problems plainly, in writing and live.
• Process builder: you enjoy optimizing workflows and running execution at scale.
• High ownership: you stay responsive when a project needs it, including evenings and weekends during crunch periods.
• Bay Area based: able to work in person in San Francisco 5x a week (financial district).

Responsibilities

• Own delivery: Run projects from customer spec to final delivery, set milestones, track throughput and cost, and hit timelines.
• Manage lab relationships: be the primary day‑to‑day contact for research teams at leading AI labs, provide reporting, anticipate needs, and spot expansion opportunities.
• Coordinate experts at scale: source, vet, onboard, train and manage domain experts and contributors for tasks, environments and reviews.
• Hold the quality bar: build review processes, incentives and workflows to raise quality, throughput and cost efficiency.
• Run the daily rhythm: lead daily internal syncs on project health, flag risks early, and translate feedback into better process and product.

Job description

Plato is seeking a Strategic Project Lead to own cross‑lab environment and data projects from spec to delivery. You will coordinate engineers and researchers, manage quality, and maintain confidence with frontier labs.

You’ll work closely with labs to ensure timelines, budgets, and success criteria are met in a high‑stakes setting. Based in San Francisco, you will lead relationships with top AI labs, shape project scope, and scale coordination across experts and reviews to drive Plato’s next