Strategic Project Lead (Financial Services)

Location

San Francisco, CA — Dogpatch

Compensation

$150,000 – $225,000 Base + 0.25%–0.5% Equity

Visa

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

Company Stage of Funding

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

Office Type

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

Travel

Not specified

Company Description

We’re 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.

What You Will Do

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

You’ll 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 Customer Delivery & Quality

• 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

Drive Product & Engineering Execution

• 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

Manage Customer Relationships

• 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

Build Operational Systems

• 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 Strategic & Financial Planning

• 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

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 1–3 years of professional experience in investment banking, private equity, hedge funds, or top-tier consulting
• Strong preference for candidates with 1–2 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

Finance & Analytical Requirements

• 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

AI & Technology Requirements

• 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

Entrepreneurial & Operational Background

• 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

Soft Skills

• 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

Compensation & Benefits

• $150,000 – $225,000 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

Why Join

• 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