Research Program Manager

Who We Are Percepta’s mission is to transform critical institutions with applied AI. We care that industries that power the world (e.g. healthcare, manufacturing, energy) benefit from frontier technology. To make that happen, we embed with industry-leading customers to drive AI transformation. We bring together:

• Forward-deployed expertise in engineering, product, and research

• Mosaic, our in-house toolkit for rapidly deploying agentic workflows

• Strategic partnerships with Anthropic, McKinsey, AWS, companies within the General Catalyst portfolio, and more

Our team is a quickly growing group of Applied AI Engineers, Embedded Product Managers and Researchers motivated by diffusing the promise of AI into improvements we can feel in our day to day lives. Percepta is a direct partnership with General Catalyst, a global transformation and investment company.

About The Role Percepta's research org runs four parallel tracks — world modeling, forecasting, user modeling, and optimization — each feeding a shared pipeline: a world model compresses the operation, forecasters and user models score what happens next, and optimizers choose the best action. That structure only works if someone is actively running the machinery behind it — tracking where each track's research actually stands, where shared resources like compute are going, and whether commitments made to research leadership and customer-facing teams are on track.

Responsibilities

• Own the operating rhythm of the research org: roadmap tracking, milestone check-ins, status reporting, and the recurring rituals that keep four research tracks legible to each other and to leadership.

• Track dependencies across the four research tracks (e.g. a forecaster waiting on a world model, an optimizer waiting on a user model) and surface them proactively, rather than letting them surface late.

• Manage allocation of shared infrastructure — compute, data access, and research engineering time across competing priorities, and escalate trade-offs rather than resolve them unilaterally.

• Maintain a single, accurate view of commitments: what's been promised to customer-facing teams, what the research org has committed to shipping, and progress against both.

• Coordinate the mechanics of getting research to external output where applicable — timelines, internal review, compliance — without owning the research content itself.

• Build and maintain the systems (trackers, docs, dashboards) that let a fast-growing, deeply technical research team stay organized without adding process for its own sake.

• Act as the connective tissue between Research Leads, Embedded Product Managers, and Applied AI Engineers by making sure the right people have the right information to make them.

What We're Looking For

• Have prior experience as a program or technical program manager (TPM) supporting a research, ML, or other deeply technical organization with multiple parallel work streams.

• Are comfortable reading and reasoning about technical research content well enough to track dependencies and risk, without needing to do the research yourself or set its direction.

• Default to operational rigor: you build the tracker before someone asks for it, and you notice the dependency before it's blocking.

• Are an excellent communicator who can translate status and risk between research leads, engineers, product managers, and non-technical stakeholders.

• Are comfortable with ambiguity — this org and its processes are young, and you'll be building some of the operating model as you go, not inheriting a finished playbook.

• Have a proven track record of keeping complex, multi-team technical work on track and shipping, measured by outcomes rather than activity.

• Enjoy extreme ownership of the org's operational health, even when the underlying research isn't yours to direct.

We're working against an incredibly ambitious mission. It won't be easy but it will likely be the most fulfilling work of your career. If that excites you, let's chat, even if you don't meet all of the qualifications above.

About Our Team As an organization, Percepta is committed to inclusion and belonging, and our people are our greatest investment! We’re working against an incredibly ambitious mission. It won’t be easy, but it will likely be the most fulfilling work of your career. In addition to competitive compensation, equity, 401(k) matching, comprehensive health and family benefits, and lunch every day, we offer a culture built on autonomy and trust. We strongly believe that the boldest solutions come from teams who dream bigger together, and that means bringing in people from every kind of background, experience, and path. We are an office-first team that values the impact of in-person collaboration, but we focus on outcomes over outputs—believing that we are each responsible for solving the "whole problem" to make our customers win. If you don't check every box on this description but you care deeply about the problems we're tackling, seeking the truth, and wanting to own outcomes alongside a team that has your back, then we want to hear from you! We know self-doubt keeps great people from applying, so please don't count yourself out before we've had the chance to meet you. Tackling the hardest problems takes a range of perspectives in the room, and we believe that's how we build something truly game-changing. Our company values are more than just words on a page. They inform how our team shows up every day:

Our Values Dream bigger: We have the unique privilege of taking on the most ambitious problems and we should chase them with optimism, responsibility, and genuine belief that we can make it happen. We have to embrace the hard things when no one else will.

Heart in the game: What we're doing matters and we have to give a shit. Internally, that means fixing badness when you find it. Externally, it means honoring the trust our customers place in us with their most important problems. This isn’t a 9-5, nor is it a job we’re ever going to monitor your hours. We promise to put work in front of you that matters and in return, we ask you to promise to care.

Win for the customer: Everyone is an engineer and the job of an engineer is to deliver outcomes, not outputs. Everything we do—the products we build, the partnerships we launch, the strategy we set—exists to make our customers successful. Delivery is the strategy.

Make the call: Organizations are only as strong as the pace at which they make decisions. Everyone at Percepta should feel empowered to commit and shape the ambiguity in front of them. But "make the call" cuts both ways: make the decision and make the phone call. High-agency decision-making only works with high-bandwidth communication and we commit to never operate in silos.

Intensity with kindness: We believe in excellence in execution, candor in feedback, ruthlessness in prioritization, and survivalist urgency. We also believe you don't need to be an asshole to deliver on any of this. The trust built through shared kindness and vulnerability is what makes the intensity sustainable.

Percepta is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and we evaluate every qualified applicant on their merits and give equal consideration for employment regardless of race, color, creed, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, veteran or uniformed service status, age, or any other characteristic protected under applicable law. Percepta provides reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees in accordance with federal and applicable state law.