Strategic Project Lead, RL Environments for Financial AI (SF, On-site)
Lavendo · San Francisco
Extracted from the posting
Strategic Project Lead running account delivery for an RL environment company building computer-use and tool-use training environments for frontier AI labs in financial services tasks like Excel and PowerPoint. Role manages contractors, customer requirements, quality, and roadmap alongside engineering. Requires finance background and hands-on use of AI coding tools.
Lavendo partners with startups and high‑growth companies to help them hire top‑tier sales, GTM, and technical talent. This role is with one of our clients; we’ll share full details about the company and interview process as we get to know you and confirm mutual fit.
About the Company
Our client is a fast-moving AI startup in San Francisco that recently closed a $30M Series A with participation from Y Combinator. The team builds fully managed reinforcement learning (RL) environments and benchmarks - high-quality computer-use and tool-use "gyms" - that frontier AI labs use to train agents to do real financial services work: Excel modeling, PowerPoint creation, and more across investment banking, private equity and hedge funds. They work directly with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind to train financial services capabilities into their next-gen models - when Claude gets better at Excel, that's partly our client's work. And they're doing it with strong revenue traction already in place.
The Mission
Train the "Financial Services Super Intelligence." Our client works directly with frontier labs to teach the next generation of AI agents how to do real finance work - at the quality bar of the best bankers, investors, and consultants.
The Opportunity
As a Strategic Project Lead, you'll drive account delivery on a small, high-impact core team. You'll work directly with frontier lab customers, shape the product alongside engineering, and help define how AI agents learn to do finance. This is a rare chance to bring your finance or consulting background into the center of frontier AI - with real ownership from day one.
What You'll Do
- Own day-to-day delivery and quality of training environments shipped to frontier lab customers, including managing contractors and running experiments
- Act as one of the lead product managers - form opinions on the product, work with engineers to ship features, and drive the product roadmap in tight partnership with engineering
- Manage customer relationships - understand requirements, set expectations and make sure every deliverable meets the quality bar
- Build operational systems - documentation, quality guardrails and scalable processes that support rapid project cycles
- Contribute to strategic and financial planning across pricing, revenue modeling and project economics
What You Bring
- 2+ years in investment banking, private equity, hedge funds or finance-focused consulting - and the ability to explain the work you've done in depth
- A track record of running projects or workstreams end to end, including managing external stakeholders, contractors or high-level client deliverables
- Startup experience or exposure - startup operations, startup internships, or starting your own company
- A self-starter track record - an entrepreneurial side project, a business you started, or something meaningful you built on your own
- Hands-on building with AI tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or similar) - be ready to explain what you built, why it mattered and how it relates to this role
- Ability to work full-time in person in San Francisco, 5 days a week
- Nice-to-have: a degree from a strong technical or CS program
Key Success Drivers
- Depth - you can walk through a deal or project you owned in detail: how it started, how the pieces fit, what you delivered
- Builder mindset - you experiment with AI tools and build with them, not just prompt them
- Ownership - you take projects from messy requirements to a finished, high-quality deliverable
- Genuine excitement about AI - you're curious about RL environments and why training AI on finance work matters
- Client presence - you're comfortable working with sophisticated external customers and setting clear expectations
- Stability and momentum - steady progression and meaningful tenure in recent roles
- In-person energy - you want to build side by side with a small team, 5 days a week
Why Join?
- Direct impact on frontier AI - your work shapes how the next generation of AI models learns to do finance
- Competitive comp - $175K-$275K base plus 0.05-0.3% early-stage equity upside and flexible bonus structures
- Fully covered healthcare, including dental and vision
- Free meals while working and a gym membership
- Free transportation to and from the office (Uber/Waymo)
- $10K+ relocation stipend
- 401(k) with 4% match
- Visa sponsorship - H-1B transfers supported; new sponsorship available, including OPT/new grad
Interviewing Process
- Initial Screen - intro call on your background and past work
- Second Round - practical deep dive with the project leads
- Take-Home Case Study - a scoped project based on real work
- Case Study Presentation - present your case study to the team
We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, disability, genetic information, veteran or military status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by law.
Compensation: $175K - $275K
