Technical Program Manager, Research

United States Digital Space LLC; New York, San Francisco (NY, CA); Hybrid; USD 365,000 - 435,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is seeking a Technical Program Manager for Research to define and build programs that research teams need most. You'll work across compute, evals, RL environments, and emerging initiatives, moving quickly to understand researchers' needs and deliver impactful programs.

This 0‑to‑1 role requires strong stakeholder management, experience with ML research or engineering, and the ability to operate in high‑ambiguity environments while aligning research,

Qualifications

• Background in ML research or engineering with several years of experience building technical programs from scratch.
• Fast learner able to ramp on unfamiliar technical domains quickly.
• Resourceful, high‑agency, and able to navigate ambiguity and shifting priorities.
• Operational ownership of complex technical systems, including monitoring, incident response, and performance optimization.
• Excellent stakeholder management and ability to influence senior technical staff through competence and delivery.
• Comfortable with high‑stakes environments where compute spend, training timelines and launch outcomes matter.

Responsibilities

• Embed deeply within a research domain to understand the technical landscape and identify high‑leverage problems.
• Move across research areas like compute, evals, RL environments and emerging initiatives.
• Drive end‑to‑end execution of complex, ambiguous research initiatives spanning multiple teams.
• Establish processes and frameworks that bring structure to unstructured research environments.
• Lead large‑scale compute resource planning across research and production workstreams.
• Drive eval readiness for model launches with standardized results and transparent reporting.
• Own execution and health of RL environments across major training runs.
• Equip research leadership to make decisions quickly by detailing technical tradeoffs.
• Act as the connective tissue between research, engineering and product teams.

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent (education, training and/or experience)

Job description

About the company

the company’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the Role

the company's research organization works across the full model development lifecycle, from pre-training and post-training to alignment, interpretability, and safety, each operating at the frontier of AI development. As a Technical Program Manager for Research, you'll define and build the programs that research teams need most. You'll move across research areas like compute, evals, RL environments, and emerging research initiatives, going deep enough in each to understand how researchers work and what they need. You'll identify where the biggest opportunities for impact lie, find the highest-leverage gaps, and build the programs, processes, and tooling that allow researchers to focus on research. This is a 0-to-1 role: you'll explore new domains as priorities shift, determine what each one needs, and create lasting impact where none existed before.

*Note: This role may require responding to incidents on short-notice, including on weekends.*

Responsibilities

• Embed deeply within a research domain to understand the technical landscape, build trust with researchers and technical leaders, and identify the highest-leverage problems to solve, knowing the surface area will shift over time as research priorities evolve

• Move fluidly across research areas like compute, evals, RL environments, and emerging research initiatives, picking up new domains quickly and getting to depth fast

• Drive end-to-end execution of complex, ambiguous research initiatives spanning multiple teams, often without established playbooks or precedent

• Establish processes and frameworks that bring structure to unstructured research environments without slowing researchers down

• Lead efforts like large-scale compute resource planning, including allocation, efficiency, and prioritization across research and production workstreams

• Drive eval readiness for model launches by standardizing results, shaping eval plans early, improving tooling, and ensuring honest, transparent reporting across research, product, and marketing

• Own execution and operational health of RL environments across major training runs, coordinating cross-team trade-offs and feeding insights back into roadmap planning

• Equip research leadership to make decisions quickly by going deep on technical tradeoffs and presenting clear, actionable recommendations

• Act as the connective tissue between research, engineering, and product teams to reduce chaos and accelerate execution

You May Be a Good Fit If You

• Have a background in ML research or engineering with several years of experience building technical programs from scratch, ideally with hands‑on exposure to training, evaluation, or large-scale distributed systems

• Are a fast learner who can ramp on unfamiliar technical domains quickly and contribute meaningfully to discussions with researchers

• Are resourceful, high‑agency, and able to navigate ambiguity and shifting priorities to drive progress in fast‑moving research environments

• Have a track record of operational ownership of complex technical systems, including monitoring, incident response, and performance optimization

• Can reason about technical tradeoffs at depth across model architecture, training infrastructure, evals, or compute efficiency, and translate them into clear decisions for leadership

• Have excellent stakeholder management skill and the ability to influence senior technical staff through competence and consistent delivery

• Are comfortable with high‑stakes environments where decisions impact compute spend, model training timelines, and launch outcomes

• Are passionate about the potential impact of AI and are committed to developing safe and beneficial systems

• Are excited to redefine what technical program management looks like at the frontier of AI research

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings (\"OTE\") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$365,000—$435,000 USD

LogisticsMinimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices. Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At the company we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long‑term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI rese