Strategic Project Lead (Financial Services)

San Francisco CA Dogpatch

$150000 $225000 Base 0.25%0.5% Equity

Open to Visa Transfers OPT and H-1B transfers supported; new visa sponsorship available

Early Stage / YC-Backed Founded 2024 $8.5M Raised

On-site 5 days per week in-person in Dogpatch San Francisco

Not specified

Were building the infrastructure that enables frontier AI models to learn how to perform real work across financial services.

The company builds fully managed environments and benchmarks that allow leading AI labs to train computer-use and tool-use agents in realistic financial workflows. These environments help AI systems learn tasks across investment banking private equity hedge funds and other financial services from financial modeling and Excel work to PowerPoint creation and complex analytical workflows.

The team works directly with frontier AI labs and is building the next generation of financial-services AI training environments. With a small highly ambitious team and $8.5M in funding there is significant opportunity to shape both the product and the operating systems from the ground up as the company scales toward its next stage of growth.

This is an unusually high-ownership environment where project leads work across finance operations product engineering customers and AI experimentation.

As a Strategic Project Lead youll own the day-to-day delivery and quality of financial-services training environments shipped to leading AI customers.

Youll operate at the intersection of finance product operations and engineering acting as a de facto product manager while managing customer requirements contractors experiments and internal processes.

• Own day-to-day delivery of training environments and benchmarks shipped to leading AI labs
• Manage project execution from requirements through delivery and quality review
• Coordinate contractors and other contributors supporting project delivery
• Run experiments and evaluate outputs to ensure training environments meet high quality standards
• Review financial models client deliverables and workflows for accuracy and reasonableness
• Identify quality issues and drive them to resolution
• Ensure projects move quickly while maintaining a high bar for customer deliverables

• Act as a de facto product manager for financial-services training environments
• Form strong opinions about product direction and identify opportunities to improve the user experience
• Work closely with engineers to define requirements and ship product features
• Help shape the product roadmap alongside the engineering team
• Translate customer and project requirements into clear technical and operational priorities
• Identify recurring patterns and opportunities to build scalable product capabilities
• Balance immediate customer needs with longer-term product strategy

• Work directly with customers to understand requirements and expectations
• Translate customer needs into actionable project requirements
• Set clear expectations around timelines quality and deliverables
• Maintain strong customer relationships throughout project execution
• Ensure delivered environments meet customer standards and business objectives
• Communicate project status risks and tradeoffs clearly to internal and external stakeholders

• Create documentation processes and quality guardrails from scratch
• Develop scalable systems for managing rapid project cycles
• Improve workflows that allow the team to execute projects in months rather than years
• Establish repeatable quality-control processes
• Identify operational bottlenecks and build systems to eliminate them
• Help create the infrastructure required to scale the team and project volume

• Contribute to pricing and revenue modeling
• Evaluate project economics and financial tradeoffs
• Help determine the economics and scalability of customer projects
• Support broader strategic planning as the company grows
• Develop a strong understanding of the relationship between product decisions customer value and business outcomes

• 13 years of professional experience in investment banking private equity hedge funds or top-tier consulting
• Strong preference for candidates with 12 years of highly analytical finance experience
• Must be able to deeply explain the work completed in previous roles
• Strong exposure to financial services and financial analysis
• Experience reviewing financial models transaction materials or client deliverables
• Demonstrated ability to independently own projects or workstreams
• Experience operating in demanding high-performance environments
• Evidence of taking initiative beyond formally assigned responsibilities

• Strong understanding of financial services
• Comfortable reviewing financial models and assessing outputs for reasonableness
• Strong financial modeling and analytical skills
• Ability to understand complex financial workflows and identify errors or inconsistencies
• Strong quantitative and structured problem-solving ability
• Familiarity with investment banking private equity hedge funds or related financial services workflows
• Ability to quickly learn unfamiliar financial processes and domains

• Active experimentation with AI tools such as ChatGPT Claude Cursor or similar
• Genuine curiosity about how AI can improve knowledge work and financial workflows
• Comfortable working closely with engineers and technical teams
• Ability to translate business and customer requirements into clear product or technical requirements
• Strong willingness to learn new technical tools and workflows
• Experience building or experimenting with AI-powered workflows is a strong plus

• Demonstrated self-starter mentality
• Entrepreneurial side project startup experience business built independently or another meaningful example of initiative strongly preferred
• Experience creating processes or systems from scratch
• Comfortable working without established playbooks
• Ability to identify problems independently and build practical solutions
• Comfortable managing multiple priorities in a rapidly changing environment

• Extremely high ownership and agency
• Strong bias toward action and execution
• Highly organized and operationally rigorous
• Excellent written and verbal communication
• Comfortable working directly with customers
• Strong judgment and attention to detail
• Able to operate effectively with significant autonomy
• Resourceful and pragmatic
• Comfortable moving quickly and adapting to changing priorities
• Strong product and business instincts
• Naturally curious and eager to experiment
• Thrives in a small high-performance startup environment

• $150000 $225000 base salary depending on experience and qualifications
• 0.25%0.5% equity
• Full-time position
• On-site work environment 5 days per week in Dogpatch San Francisco
• Open to visa transfers including OPT and H-1B transfers
• New visa sponsorship available including OPT/new graduate visas

• Work directly on the next generation of AI training environments for financial services
• Collaborate with frontier AI labs building increasingly capable AI agents
• Combine finance AI product operations and strategy in one high-ownership role
• Have significant influence on product direction and company operations
• Own projects from customer requirements through delivery and optimization
• Build operational systems and processes from scratch
• Work at a very early-stage company where individual contributions have immediate impact
• Join a small ambitious team preparing for its next stage of growth
• Gain exposure to the intersection of financial services and frontier AI