Strategic Projects Associate - Coding

Skills this role screens for

About the role

ABOUT AFTERQUERY

AfterQuery https://www.afterquery.com/ is an applied research lab curating data solutions for foundation model development. We serve every frontier AI lab with the mission of delivering the best data to power the best models. In doing so, we can make expertise that once took a lifetime to build available to anyone who needs it.

Our customers are the ones building the foundation models themselves and our work sits directly in the loop of how those systems improve. This is a rare opportunity to join a company at a defining moment in AI. Forbes reported that we could be YC's fastest unicorn, reportedly raising at a $3.2 billion valuation. We're based in San Francisco and backed by leading investors including Altos Ventures, BoxGroup, and Y Combinator and angels from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Microsoft AI.

Also

WHY APPLY

Massive Opportunity: Forbes reported that we could be YC's fastest unicorn, reportedly raising at a $3.2 billion valuation, and we're not slowing down.

Founding Impact: You will own and architect core infrastructure systems that power our platform from the ground up.

Equity & Growth: Competitive salary and meaningful equity. As we scale, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the engineering organization and lead major technical initiatives.

Strong Team: Our founding team has experience from Citadel Securities, Meta, Google, Silver Lake, and Morgan Stanley — work alongside world-class engineers and researchers.

Also

OVERVIEW

You'll work with the world's leading AI organizations to build next-generation data solutions, managing expert teams across finance, software engineering, law, and more to deliver high-quality outputs at scale. You'll shape the dataset specifications that directly influence how frontier models are trained and evaluated, owning projects end-to-end from scoping through delivery in a fast-moving, high-stakes environment. Along the way, you'll pick up broad operational experience, moving fluidly across building, analyzing, coordinating, and executing wherever the business needs it most.

The work

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Project and client management: Work with the world’s leading AI organizations to build next-generation data solutions that push the limits of model capability, while directly driving revenue.
• Manage expert teams across domains: Lead and coordinate highly specialized contributors across fields like software engineering, data science, and machine learning.
• Shape how AI systems are trained: Design dataset specifications that directly influence how frontier models are evaluated and improved. Your taste and judgement will shape what foundation models become.
• Drive high-impact execution end-to-end: Own critical projects from idea to delivery. From scoping, executing, iterating, and shipping in a fast-moving, high-stakes environment, you will touch it all.
• Gain top tier operational experience: Support the team across a range of operational initiatives that will directly contribute to the future of AfterQuery. You will work across multiple parts of the business in the same week, ranging from building, analyzing, coordinating, and executing where needed most.

Who they want

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Strong technical background: CS degree, engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated ability to ship technical projects
• High agency, drive, and a strong work ethic; thrive in ambiguity and execute with minimal direction
• Passion for AI and interest in entrepreneurship; enjoy experimenting with new tools (experience with Claude Code is a plus)
• Competitive nature and demonstrated past success
• Strong leadership experience and excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Thrive in fast-moving, high-impact environments with bias towards action, while balancing attention to detail
• Proficiency in Python and comfort writing production-quality code

Nice to have

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Technical skills (coding, scr