SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
AfterQuery is an applied research lab that curates data solutions for foundation model development, serving frontier AI labs with the mission of delivering the best data to power the best models. The company is backed by leading investors including Altos Ventures, BoxGroup, and Y Combinator, with angels from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Microsoft AI.
You will serve as Research Program Manager, owning the operations behind AfterQuery's research programs: public benchmark releases, collaborations with academic and industry partners, and the research roadmap. This is a technical, hands-on role that combines program coordination with direct research contribution. You will read results tables, run evaluations, sanity-check numbers before public release, and turn loosely specified research needs into engineering and operational roadmaps. You are the program's voice to external partners, requiring clear writing and confident communication across researchers, executives, and academics alongside technical fluency.
Key responsibilities include: serving as the point of contact for collaborations with academic and industry partners (fellowships, grants, joint research projects); coordinating benchmark releases end-to-end from launch through publication; maintaining AfterQuery's leaderboards and benchmark sites with verification of all results; tracking progress across active research projects, anticipating resourcing gaps and technical bottlenecks, and escalating timeline/scope changes with clear recommendations; coordinating the expert pool for benchmarks (forecasting needs, managing capacity, contributor logistics); and writing external and internal communications (launch briefs, partner updates, planning documents, status memos) that distill technical detail into actionable summaries.
You will work daily with researchers, engineers, domain experts, and go-to-market partners in a fast-moving research environment.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 1–3+ years in research operations, technical program management, or similar role in a fast-moving research or engineering organization
- Technical background in computer science, machine learning, statistics, or related field, with working Python and SQL
- Evaluation literacy: experience evaluating a product, agent, or foundation model; ability to read results tables and assess data reliability
- Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to distill technical results into summaries actionable by partners, executives, or academics
- Track record of running cross-functional programs end-to-end, including managing external partners, contractors, or collaborators
- Comfort with ambiguity and building processes from scratch, with judgment to keep processes light so researchers stay effective
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Graduate degree or research experience in a technical field
- Contribution to a benchmark, dataset, or evaluation project in any role
- Familiarity with public leaderboards or open research communities
- Exposure to programs with external partners (fellowships, grants, academic collaborations)
- Exposure to expert or annotator pools or other human-data work
- Comfort with lightweight dashboards or building small tools with AI assistants
