Founding Strategic Projects Lead
Overview
A seed-stage AI data company is hiring a Founding Strategic Projects Lead, Finance Track to own high-value strategic projects for frontier AI lab customers.
This is a rare opportunity for someone coming from investment banking or private equity who wants to move into an early-stage, high-ownership operating role while still using sharp financial modeling skills. The company sells premium, high-margin data to frontier AI labs and recently raised from a top-tier venture firm.
You’ll work directly with the founding team and own end-to-end delivery across finance-focused AI data projects, including quality control, task creation, customer delivery, enterprise partnerships, and proprietary data sourcing.
This is a true execution-heavy founding role. The right person is highly analytical, gritty, creative, and excited by the upside of an uncapped commission structure. Each Strategic Projects Lead can personally carry $20M–$30M in ARR ownership, with average contract values around $2M and some projects reaching high-seven-figure scale.
Location: Palo Alto / Menlo Park, CA(Preferred)
Work Type: Remote
Employment Type: Full-time
Compensation: $130K–$175K base + uncapped OTE
Visa Sponsorship: Not available
Responsibilities
In this role, you will:
- Own quality control for finance-related data projects delivered to frontier AI lab customers
- Create, review, and improve finance tasks used to train reinforcement learning models
- Build and evaluate training data based on financial models, including LBOs and comparable company analyses
- Train other team members on task creation, project standards, and quality expectations
- Work directly with the founding team on customer delivery and high-priority strategic initiatives
- Brainstorm product ideas that help distribute products into the real world and unlock access to proprietary data
- Lead negotiations and partnerships with enterprises to source high-value data
- Take ownership of large customer projects, with the potential to personally carry $20M–$30M in ARR
- Operate with urgency, autonomy, and a high bar for execution in a small early-stage team environment
Qualifications
Must-haves:
- 2–5 years of investment banking or private equity experience
- Experience at a reputable investment bank or private equity firm
- Strong Excel modeling skills, including hands-on experience with LBOs and comparable company models
- Experience building financial models on real transactions
- Willingness to keep financial modeling skills sharp, even though this is not a traditional finance/deal execution role
- High grit, strong judgment, and creative problem-solving ability
- Comfort working through ambiguous, unstructured problems
- Excitement about joining a small, fast-moving team with significant ownership
- Openness to a high-intensity environment where the team is often in office on weekends
Strong pluses:
- Background from a top investment bank, such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Evercore, Centerview, Lazard, Moelis, or similar
- Background from a top private equity firm, such as KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, Carlyle, or similar
- Strong school plus strong finance platform combination
- Boutique private equity experience with clear, demonstrated impact
- Prior exposure to AI, data, frontier labs, or RLM-related work
- Competitive background, side projects, athletics, academic excellence, or other evidence of grit
- Excitement about uncapped commission and willingness to grind for outsized upside
- Willingness to work some days per week in person in the Palo Alto / Menlo Park office
This is likely not the right fit for someone without IB or PE experience, someone looking for a traditional 9–5 role.
Benefits
- $130K–$175K base salary
- Uncapped OTE / commission upside
- Significant ownership over high-value customer projects
- Direct exposure to founders and frontier AI lab customers
- Opportunity to join a seed-stage company at the ground floor
- Lunch or dinner in office
- Health insurance
- Bay Club or Equinox membership
- High-autonomy role with a direct path to substantial earnings and career growth