Research Technical Program Manager

About AfterQuery

Our customers are the ones building the foundation models themselves and our work sits directly in the loop of how those systems improve. This is a rare opportunity to join a company at a defining moment in AI. Forbes reported that we could be YC's fastest unicorn, reportedly raising at a $3.2 billion valuation. We're based in San Francisco and backed by leading investors including Altos Ventures, BoxGroup, and Y Combinator and angels from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Microsoft AI.

Why Apply

Massive Opportunity: Forbes reported that we could be YC's fastest unicorn, reportedly raising at a $3.2 billion valuation, and we're not slowing down.

Equity & Growth: Competitive salary and meaningful equity. As we scale, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the engineering organization and lead major technical initiatives.

Overview

Your job is to make ambitious research programs move. You will own the execution of programs spanning post-training, enterprise post-training, fellowships, evaluation releases, and partner research. You will turn open-ended research goals into clear plans, keep researchers, engineers, SPLs and external partners aligned, and surface the decisions and blockers that matter.

This is not a traditional project-management role. You must understand the technical work well enough to reason about experiments, datasets, evaluations, training pipelines, and research tradeoffs. Your impact will come from creating just enough structure for the team to run more programs, make better decisions, and ship high-quality work faster.

Responsibilities

• Own planning and execution across post-training, enterprise post-training, fellowship, and public evaluation programs.
• Translate ambiguous research objectives into milestones, owners, dependencies, success criteria, and decision points.
• Maintain a trustworthy view of program health, including experiment progress, risks, blockers, partner dependencies, and upcoming releases.

Required Qualifications

• 2-4 years project/program management experience
• Experience leading complex technical programs across research, machine learning, engineering, or data organizations
• Working knowledge of the LLM development lifecycle, including data creation, SFT, RL-based post-training, and evaluation
• Strong communication and an ability to turn messy technical information into clear decisions and next steps

Company Benefits (For Eligible Employees):

We comply with applicable pay transparency requirements and provide compensation ranges based on the position, qualifications, experience, and other relevant factors. Reasonable accommodations are available to qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs, as required by law. This job description is intended to describe the general nature and level of work performed and is not an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, qualifications, or working conditions associated with the position.