What are the responsibilities and job description for the Strategic Product Manager position at scaleai?
About the role
We’re hiring a Strategic Product Manager to sit at the intersection of frontier AI research, product, and go-to-market. You’ll partner closely with account executives in high-stakes meetings, scope and pitch solutions to top AI labs, and translate research needs (post-training, evals, alignment) into clear product roadmaps and measurable outcomes. You’ll own end-to-end delivery—from discovery and PRD to pilot, launch, and iteration—with deep cross-functional leadership across research, engineering, ops, and finance.
What you’ll do
- Ride shotgun with AEs: join customer pitches, shape solutions live, and convert needs into scoped SOWs and product plans.
- Translate research → product: work with client side researchers on post-training (SFT/RLHF/RM/DPO/GRPO), evals, safety/alignment and build the primitives, data, and tooling they need.
- Own full lifecycle: drive discovery, write crisp PRDs, prioritize trade-offs, run experiments, ship v1s, and scale successful pilots into repeatable offerings.
- Lead complex customer programs: independently run high-stakes sessions with senior stakeholders; set success metrics; communicate risk and path to green.
- Partner across Scale: collaborate with research (agents, browser/SWE agents), platform, ops, security, and finance to deliver dependable results for customers.
- Build evaluation rigor: stand up eval suites (RLVR/benchmarks), close the loop with data quality, and publish internal learnings that raise the bar across accounts.
You have
- PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or AI (or equivalent research experience) from a top university
- 5–10 years in product/research/ENG roles working with LLMs or multimodal systems; hands-on with post-training and evaluations.
- Strong technical fluency: you can read papers, interrogate metrics, write or review complex Python/SQL for analysis, and reason about model-data trade-offs.
- Executive presence with world-class researchers and enterprise leaders; excellent writing and storytelling.
- Comfort in the field: you like joining sales calls, whiteboarding solutions, and turning ambiguous asks into scoped plans.
- Bias to action: you ship, learn, and iterate.
Nice to have
- Publications in top venues (NeurIPS/ICLR/ICML), or shipped features grounded in research.
- Experience building agentic or evaluation systems.
- Prior customer-facing work with frontier labs or large AI platform teams.
How you’ll work
- Customer-obsessed: start from real research needs; prototype quickly; validate with data.
- Cross-functional by default: align research, engineering, ops, and GTM on a single plan; communicate clearly up and down.
- Field-forward: expect regular customer time alongside our AEs and research leads; light travel as needed.
Success looks like
- Clear wins with top labs: pilots that convert to scaled programs with strong eval signals.
- Reusable alignment & eval building blocks that shorten time-to-value across accounts.
- Crisp internal docs (PRDs, experiment readouts, exec updates) that drive decisions quickly.
Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position, determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, interview performance, and relevant education or training. Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equity based compensation, subject to Board of Director approval. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for equity grant. You’ll also receive benefits including, but not limited to: Comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, a learning and development stipend, and generous PTO. Additionally, this role may be eligible for additional benefits such as a commuter stipend.
Please reference the job posting's subtitle for where this position will be located. For pay transparency purposes, the base salary range for this full-time position in the locations of San Francisco, New York, Seattle is:
$1 - $1 USD
PLEASE NOTE: Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants.
About Us:
At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Cisco, DLA Piper, Mayo Clinic, Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the Army and Air Force. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.
We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status.
We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at accommodations@scale.com. Please see the United States Department of Labor's Know Your Rights poster for additional information.
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