Strategic Project Lead

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

Strategic Project Lead

About Plato

Plato is an applied research lab building the foundational infrastructure to train specialized AI agents.

We turn real-world data streams into high-fidelity simulated environments that generate the training signal needed to make capable models. Our work supports frontier labs, hyperscalers, and enterprises building AI systems for complex, high-stakes work.

Today, only a handful of players can train models for capable work. Compute and algorithms are rapidly commoditizing, but reinforcement learning data remains the bottleneck. Plato is changing that by automatically scaling training environments from proprietary real-world data.

Why Apply

• Work with the frontier: You will be the day-to-day partner to research teams at the world's top AI labs, running the environment projects that shape how their next models are trained and evaluated.

• Real ownership: You run projects end to end, from a lab's first spec to final delivery, with a direct line to the founders.

• High-stakes execution: Tight timelines, demanding researchers, and a quality bar where one leaky reward or brittle verifier can sink a project. Every project you deliver well grows Plato's work with that lab.

• Room to grow: You start as an individual contributor running projects. Strong performers move up to running multiple projects and leading the team of project leads that follows.

The Role

A great environment is only as good as its delivery.

Strategic Project Lead is a hands‑on operations role. You will own Plato's environment and data projects for frontier labs from start to finish: turning a lab's research needs into a clear spec, coordinating the engineers and domain experts who build the tasks and verifiers, holding the quality bar, and keeping the customer informed and confident at every step. The trust you build with each lab is what drives Plato's next project with them.

What You'll Do

• Own Delivery: Run projects from customer spec to final delivery. Set milestones, track throughput and cost, and hit timelines that often move fast.

• Manage Lab Relationships: Serve as the primary day-to-day contact for research teams at leading AI labs. Provide consistent, transparent reporting, anticipate what they need next, and spot opportunities to expand the work.

• Coordinate Experts at Scale: Source, vet, onboard, train and manage the domain experts and contributors who build tasks, environments and reviews, sometimes ramping large groups on a few days' notice.

• Hold the Quality Bar: Build the review processes, incentives and workflows that raise quality, throughput and cost‑efficiency. Work with engineering and research to catch reward hacking, leaky rewards and brittle verifiers before the customer does.

• Run the Daily Rhythm: Lead daily internal syncs on project health, flag risks early, and turn customer feedback into better process and product.

Required Qualifications

• Track Record: 2 + years at a top research lab, or AI native startup company or another operationally 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)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience running data, annotation, evaluation or RL 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 contractors or expert workforces.

• Former founder or early startup employee.

• Hands‑on experience with LLMs, agents or evaluation tools.