Description
ABOUT SANDBOXAQ SandboxAQ is a high-growth company delivering AI solutions that address some of the world's greatest challenges. The company’s Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) power advances in life sciences, financial services, navigation, cybersecurity, and other sectors. We are a global team that is tech-focused and includes experts in AI, chemistry, cybersecurity, physics, mathematics, medicine, engineering, and other specialties. The company emerged from Alphabet Inc. as an independent, growth capital-backed company in 2022, funded by leading investors and supported by a braintrust of industry leaders. At SandboxAQ, we’ve cultivated an environment that encourages creativity, collaboration, and impact. By investing deeply in our people, we’re building a thriving, global workforce poised to tackle the world's epic challenges. Join us to advance your career in pursuit of an inspiring mission, in a community of like-minded people who value entrepreneurialism, ownership, and transformative impact. THE OPPORTUNITY R&D teams solve problems nobody has solved before. That's exactly what makes them hard to ship: the scope shifts as the science reveals itself, and the roadmap you set in January may need to look different by June, due to new results changing what “done” means. We're looking for a Technical Program Manager who has run point on programs like this before.We’re especially interested in cases where the stakes were high enough that a missed milestone was expensive, publicly visible, or both. You've been the person who saw a bottleneck three weeks before it became a crisis. You've translated between scientists who need room to explore and finance/product stakeholders who need a defensible number. And, you know how to build a roadmap that's rigorous enough to hold people accountable and flexible enough to survive contact with real research. You'll partner directly with our R&D department head and Product and Engineering to set ROI-optimal strategy, then own the execution machinery that turns that strategy into shipped, on-time, drama-free, and defensible results. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Anticipate bottlenecks before they're bottlenecks. Work with R&D and Product to define requirements, surface technical dependencies, and build delivery schedules that account for trade-offs before they become fire drills. - Translate between three different languages. R&D needs room to be wrong in productive ways. Product and Engineering need specificity and commitments. Finance needs predictability against ROI. You'll build the shared vocabulary and cadence that lets all three coexist without anyone feeling boxed in or left in the dark. - Design execution rituals that fit a scientific team:sprints, checkpoints, and reviews that create accountability without forcing lab-paced work into a factory-paced cadence. - Own the roadmap end-to-end: build it, defend it, update it as the science evolves, and make sure it stays a living tool rather than a document nobody trusts. - Drive resourcing conversations with leadership and finance, making the case for what R&D needs and when, backed by a track record they can trust. - Get launches out the door cleanly. When a milestone, paper, or product moment is on the line, you're the person orchestrating the last mile. You’ll coordinate the handoffs, catch the loose thread, and make sure it lands without a scramble. - Play a critical role in reshaping drug discovery, advancing machine learning, and protecting humanity from disease. ESSENTIAL SKILLS & EXPERIENCE - 8+ years in technical program management or a similar role, with real experience sitting inside, rather than just tracking the status of, R&D or deep-science teams that shipped world-class products. - A track record, proven by specific moments you can point to, of stepping into a program mid-crisis (a stalled milestone, a resourcing gap, a scope blowup) and getting it back on track. - Demonstrated ability to build and defend ROI-generating roadmaps fo