Strategic Project Lead, Software Engineering

Role overview

Lead the operating system that delivers software engineering data programs for advanced AI research. You’ll turn research requirements into reliable delivery across quality, timelines, throughput, contributor performance, and cost. Programs can include coding demonstrations, repository tasks, agent trajectories, reinforcement learning environments, benchmarks, code review, and rubric-based evaluations, often coordinating large distributed contributor teams.

Responsibilities

- Own delivery from customer specification through final handoff, managing scope, schedules, quality, and cost. - Diagnose production bottlenecks and improve workflows, instructions, review capacity, and contributor incentives. - Serve as the main contact for research and program stakeholders, providing clear updates and managing expectations. - Recruit, onboard, train, and manage distributed technical contributors while maintaining consistent execution standards. - Set quality measures, analyze errors and trends, and address underlying causes across annotation, review, and curation. - Document repeatable processes, benchmarks, escalation practices, and playbooks; mentor colleagues as the operation grows.

Requirements

- Experience in consulting, finance, startups, or another operationally demanding environment, with a record of managing complex projects involving multiple stakeholders. - Strong analytical skills to identify bottlenecks, define measurement approaches, and improve delivery systems. - Clear written and verbal communication, including experience working directly with demanding customers and building durable relationships. - Practical software engineering literacy: able to inspect code, understand tests, and assess whether technical workflows and quality signals meet their goals. - Interest in hands-on process improvement and the ability to manage large-scale execution in a fast-changing environment.

Benefits and work setup

- High ownership and visibility, with the chance to shape how large technical data programs are delivered. - Direct collaboration with AI research teams and opportunities to contribute to work on model training, evaluation, and agent systems. - Compensation varies by level; the source lists base salary ranges of $120,000–$200,000 for Project Leads and $150,000–$280,000 for Senior Project Leads, with additional variable compensation and equity.