Strategic Project Lead

Ambitus works with enterprises and frontier AI labs to improve how AI performs in professional settings, starting with engineering and life sciences. The mission is to automate white-collar work at firms where the gains show up in daily life, in physical engineering and life sciences, more than in purely digital tools. Customers are mid-market enterprises doing more than $50 million in revenue, and frontier labs. Ambitus is already working with three of the leading labs. People from Ambitus sit inside enterprises and automate workflows. On the back end, an automated eval platform builds evals for those custom automations, which shows where models fail and feeds the reinforcement-learning environments Ambitus sells to the labs. The loop is to embed with a company, find the failures, sell the data that improves the models, then expand inside that enterprise.

Ambitus raised a $4 million seed from Neo, with angels from OpenAI, Thinking Machines, and Summit Partners. It is at an eight-figure run rate and growing fast. The team is 6 people, going to 8, with an end-of-year goal around 15. A co-founder was early at Mercor, and the founding group includes Stanford and BCG backgrounds. Seed stage, about 1 to 10 people, founded in 2026, in San Francisco.

Ambitus is hiring a strategic project lead, an operations seat modeled on how strategic project leads work at Mercor. You own programs that turn enterprise data into datasets for labs. You agree scope and data access with enterprise partners, recruit and onboard domain experts, plan reviewer capacity, track output, acceptance rates, and cost, and coordinate delivery with lab research teams. A lot of enterprise automation is change management: meeting teams, getting approvals, and making sure people are onboarded and know how to use what gets built. Later the same week you might be sourcing experts or contractors to check data quality before it ships to a lab.

The spike is someone who takes a fuzzy task, breaks it into pieces, and executes, and who is genuinely good with people. You are expected to grow into owning lab accounts and selling. The founders manage those relationships today. Data and AI exposure matters more than pure client-facing polish, because this environment is chaotic in a way consulting is not. A consulting operator without that exposure left after two weeks. People from data backgrounds know what they are walking into and stay calm. Data moves fast and is fairly undifferentiated, so you compete on execution. There is no stable month-long plan. The contracts are opportunistic, which is different from a product startup. The right person gets energy from competing for the work.

You own scope and delivery requirements with enterprise and lab partners, including what data is needed and how it can be used. You recruit and onboard domain experts, plan assignments and reviewer capacity, and give clear instructions and timely feedback. You track output, acceptance, and cost, spot delays, and adjust staffing or process. You run change management inside enterprises. You keep customers informed, manage requirement changes, and drive issues to delivery. Over time you own lab accounts and sell.

Bar: about 1 to 4 years. You have managed complex projects in operations, consulting, technical delivery, or similar work. You use data to make staffing and delivery decisions. You have been in front of customers and coordinated people across different kinds of expertise. You are detail-oriented, you change course when priorities move, and you follow through. Managing distributed teams, enterprise data, or AI training and eval programs is a bonus. Operations at a data company, taking a fuzzy mandate through to the end, comfort owning a customer relationship, and energy for high-commission opportunistic contracts are green flags. Mercor and BCG are the backgrounds they name. Being rattled by chaos, not being genuinely customer-facing, or losing confidence when the week gets turbulent is a miss.

In office in San Francisco. Visa sponsorship is limited. Equity is about 0.1% to 0.5%. A free gym membership, health, dental, and vision, and a $1,000 a month meals stipend. Posted work intensity is 9-9-6. The process is an intro conversation, a case study, an on-site, then an offer.