Strategic Projects Lead - Frontier AI

Epic Placements LLC; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

Epic Placements LLC in San Francisco seeks Strategic Projects Leads who want to own customer problems and drive revenue through technically bold solutions.

You'll work near AI labs, lead cross-functional teams, and move from vague problems to concrete execution, balancing engineering rigor with customer impact.

Qualifications

• 2-10 years of software engineering experience.
• Production-quality software experience.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language.
• Experience in technical roles such as software engineering, ML, data science, or related.
• Experience in high-growth tech environments.

Responsibilities

• Own complex, revenue-generating projects from problem to delivery.
• Work with leading AI labs on next-generation datasets and workflows.
• Remain technically hands-on and use engineering judgment on ambiguous problems.
• Build trusted relationships with sophisticated technical customers.
• Lead and coordinate cross-functional teams across engineering, science, and other domains.
• Collaborate with internal teams on AI experiments and initiatives.
• Move quickly from loosely defined problems to concrete execution.
• Take on strategic and operational initiatives as the company scales.
• Jump into technical, operational, or customer-facing tasks as needed.

Skills

Software engineering

Ownership

Customer-facing

Communication

Problem solving

Team leadership

Education

STEM degree

Job description

You're a strong software engineer—but you're not convinced your highest ceiling is spending your entire career in a traditional engineering lane.

You want to build. You also want to own customers, lead complex projects, make decisions, solve messy problems, and understand how a fast-growing company actually works.

This opportunity was built for that kind of person.

We're partnering with a rapidly growing, well-funded AI company building data infrastructure and novel datasets used to advance frontier LLMs, AI agents, and complex reasoning systems. The company works directly with leading AI labs and high-growth technology companies on some of the hardest data and experimentation problems in AI.

They're hiring a small group of Strategic Projects Leads: technically exceptional builders who want to grow into technical operators and company builders.

This is not a traditional project-management role, and it is not a conventional software-engineering seat. You'll use your engineering foundation while taking ownership far beyond the codebase.

What You'll Do

• Own complex, revenue-generating projects from initial customer problem through successful delivery.
• Work directly with leading AI labs on next-generation datasets, agentic workflows, and hard reasoning problems.
• Remain technically close to the work and use your engineering judgment to solve ambiguous problems.
• Build trusted relationships with sophisticated technical customers.
• Lead and coordinate teams of experts across software engineering, finance, science, and other specialized domains.
• Collaborate with internal engineering and research teams on new AI experiments and initiatives.
• Move quickly from loosely defined problems to concrete execution.
• Take on strategic and operational initiatives across the company as it scales.
• Jump into whatever needs to get done—technical, operational, or customer-facing.

Who We're Looking For

You have a real software-engineering foundation and have personally built and shipped software.

More importantly, you want more ownership, not less.

You may be a strong fit if you're a software engineer who has gravitated toward customers and business problems, a forward-deployed or solutions-oriented engineer, a former founder, a founding engineer, or simply the person on your team who tends to take ambiguous problems and run with them.

Successful candidates will typically bring:

• 2-10 years of software engineering experience.
• Demonstrated experience building and shipping production-quality software.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language.
• Experience in a technical role such as software engineering, machine learning, quantitative engineering, data science, or a closely related discipline.
• Experience in a strong technology environment, ideally a reputable or VC-backed company.
• A STEM degree from a highly regarded university.
• Exceptional ownership and a track record of driving projects end-to-end.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work directly with demanding technical customers.
• Comfort operating without a detailed playbook.
• The ability to execute high-quality work under aggressive timelines.
• Genuine excitement about AI and the opportunity to work close to frontier model development.

Especially Compelling Backgrounds

We'd be particularly interested in candidates who have been:

• A founder or technical co-founder.
• A founding engineer or early employee at a startup.
• A customer-facing software or product engineer.
• A technical solutions engineer who remained hands-on with code.
• An engineer who has owned 0?1 products or unusually ambiguous initiatives.
• Part of a high-growth AI, developer-tools, data-infrastructure, fintech, or other technically demanding startup.

AI experience is valuable, but high agency, engineering credibility, communication, and ownership matter more than having the perfect AI résumé.

Why This Opportunity Is Different

Most engineering roles make you choose between staying deeply technical and getting meaningful exposure to customers, revenue, strategy, and company building.

This one doesn't.

You'll have the opportunity to:

• Work directly with organizations pushing the frontier of AI.
• See how difficult AI problems move from research concepts into real-world execution.
• Own work directly tied to company revenue.
• Build customer and commercial instincts without abandoning your technical foundation.
• Lead multidisciplinary teams much earlier than you might in a traditional engineering organization.
• Gain exposure across engineering, research, operations, customers, and company strategy.
• Join early enough to meaningfully influence how the company scales.
• Earn meaningful equity and participate in substantial performance-driven upside.

For the right person, this is an opportunity to move from software engineer ? technical operator ? company builder.

The Environment

This is an ambitious, high-intensity team, and we want to be transparent about that.

The role is based in San Francisco and works onsite Monday through Friday, with an additional half-day / remote Sunday expectation. There will also be periods when the team works 60+ hours per week to deliver against important customer or company deadlines.

This will not appeal to everyone—and that's okay.

It's designed for someone who is deliberately looking for a demanding environment, wants an unusually steep learning curve, and values responsibility, speed, access, and upside over a conventional 9-to-5 structure.

Compensation & Equity

Base salary range: $150K to $225K.

The opportunity includes a highly competitive base salary, meaningful equity, and significant performance-based upside, with stated total compensation potential of $300K+ depending on level and performance.

The Bottom Line

If you're a strong engineer who wants your next role to be about more than writing code—if you want customers, ownership, AI, revenue, leadership, and company building in the same seat—this is worth a conversation.

We're looking for builders who don't just want to work at a great company.

We're looking for people who want to help build one.