Strategic Projects Lead

Chakra; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Chakra Labs seeks a Strategic Projects Lead to own customer projects end to end, from a vague lab goal to a trusted delivered dataset. You will coordinate stakeholders, manage contributors, and ensure high-quality deliverables at a rapid pace.

This hands-on role blends strategy and product management, requiring sharp judgment and the ability to influence across time zones without direct reports. You’ll work with researchers and labs closely.

Qualifications

• Experience delivering complex projects from goal to dataset under tight timelines.
• Background in consulting, banking, private equity, or startup operations preferred.
• Ability to interpret specs and coordinate multiple stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own multi-project delivery end to end, including scoping and shipping.
• Recruit and manage a pool of expert contributors for gyms and trajectories.
• Track milestones and adapt to shifting requirements in a fast-paced environment.
• Assess delivery quality before sending artifacts to customers.

Skills

Operationally intense background

Technical-adjacent

Taste and defend it

Influence without authority

Job description

About Us

Chakra Labs' mission is to encode human taste into intelligence. We build high-fidelity environments, evals, and datasets for frontier AI research, working with several of the top labs.

Our work sits at the frontier of post-training, agent environments, data quality, and research infrastructure. We care about building systems that make models better in ways that are measurable, useful, and hard to fake.

What You'd Work On

The Strategic Projects Lead owns a customer project from end to end. This typically looks like taking a vague research goal from a lab to a delivered dataset a researcher actually trusts. It is the most operationally intense seat at Chakra and the one sitting closest to the customer.

We are looking for someone that is able to deeply understand a given spec, own the relationship between a variety of stakeholders, and fulfill deliverables at a high quality bar.

As an SPL you would:

• Own multi-project delivery end to end, which may include scoping, contributor orchestration, quality assessment, and shipping.

• Recruit and manage a pool of expert contributors who build gyms and trajectories.

• Track and prioritize milestones for project completion in a space where requirements may shift overnight.

• Assess delivery quality regularly before they are sent to a customer.

This is a hands-on operations role, which involves a mix of strategy and product management. The work is specification, coordination, judgment, and follow-through at a rapid pace set by labs that want the data as soon as possible.

About You

• Operationally intense background. Consulting, banking, private equity, startup operations, ex-founder, or time in the human-data industry. Roughly 2+ years, but we can make exceptions. What matters is that you have experience with creating positive outcomes for customers on a deadline.

• Technical-adjacent. You would spend time around trajectories, verifiers, and evals.

• Taste, and the ability to defend it. You can look at a batch of work from experts and tell what's genuinely useful to a researcher versus what merely looks complete.

• You lead through influence, not authority. Your contributors are experts with other priorities across time zones. None of them report to you. You get quality and pace out of them through clear specs, credibility, and follow-through.

What Makes This Different

• Your projects directly impact our business. You’ll be given project ownership from day one. You will have to think quickly, set priorities, and ship decisions that directly affect whether customers do business with us.

• The customers are researchers, not business relations or procurement. Because you’re partnering directly with researchers, you’ll develop taste for the deeper model failures and the market dynamics driving them.

• You’ll stay close to the cutting edge of frontier model research. Since you will be iterating on real deliverables (gyms, trajectories, and eval artifacts), you’ll build an intuitive sense for how the frontier is shifting.

• The team. Our team is ex-Stripe, Snap, AWS, Microsoft, Airtable. You'll work with a small team who has years of shipping high-impact products over the last decade.