Strategic Project Lead (AI)

Location: San Francisco, United States; full-time in-person work in the office 5 days a week. A $10K+ relocation stipend is available.

Salary: $175K–$275K base, plus 0.05%–0.3% equity and flexible bonus structures.

Company

hirify.global partners with startups and high-growth companies to hire sales, go-to-market, and technical talent; this role is with a fast-moving AI startup client in San Francisco developing managed reinforcement learning environments and benchmarks for frontier AI labs.

What you will do

• Own day-to-day delivery and quality of financial-services training environments shipped to frontier lab customers.
• Manage contractors, run experiments, and ensure deliverables meet customer quality standards.
• Act as a lead product manager by shaping the product, partnering with engineers, shipping features, and driving the roadmap.
• Manage sophisticated customer relationships, gather requirements, and set expectations.
• Build documentation, quality guardrails, and scalable operational systems for rapid project cycles.
• Contribute to pricing, revenue modeling, project economics, and broader strategic and financial planning.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience in investment banking, private equity, hedge funds, or finance-focused consulting, with the ability to explain the work in depth.
• Experience running projects or workstreams end to end, including managing external stakeholders, contractors, or high-level client deliverables.
• Startup experience or exposure, such as startup operations, startup internships, or founding a company.
• A self-starter track record demonstrated through an entrepreneurial side project, a business started, or something meaningful built independently.
• Hands-on experience building with AI tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar, with the ability to explain what was built, why it mattered, and its relevance to the role.
• Ability to work full-time in person in San Francisco, 5 days a week.
• Depth in explaining deals or projects owned, including how they started, how the components fit together, and what was delivered.
• Builder mindset, ownership from unclear requirements to high-quality deliverables, genuine excitement about AI and reinforcement learning environments, and comfort with sophisticated external customers.
• Steady progression and meaningful tenure in recent roles, plus willingness to work side by side with a small team in person 5 days a week.

Nice to have

• A degree from a strong technical or computer science program.

Culture & Benefits

• Direct impact on how frontier AI models learn to perform financial-services work.
• Fully covered healthcare, including dental and vision.
• Free meals while working and a gym membership.
• Free transportation to and from the office through Uber or Waymo.
• 401(k) with a 4% match.
• Visa sponsorship, including H-1B transfers and new sponsorship for eligible candidates, including OPT/new graduates.

Hiring process

• Initial screen covering background and past work.
• Second-round practical deep dive with project leads.
• Take-home case study followed by a presentation to the team.