Research Product Manager

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:

As a Research Product Manager at Percepta, you will work across multiple customer engagements to identify, scope, and drive research work-streams that unlock transformative AI capabilities. While our Embedded Product Managers (EPMs) own the day-to-day execution and strategy for individual clients, you will bridge blue-sky research with real-world deployments across our entire portfolio.

• Research PMs identify where cutting-edge research can create breakthrough value across multiple customers and industries.

• We care deeply about translating research into production impact: you'll help customers understand which research bets are worth making, how to evaluate success, and how to integrate research outcomes into their operations.

• We are creative problem solvers and relentlessly practical: you'll balance long-term research vision with near-term value delivery, running experiments across clients to validate research directions and working closely with our research team to push the envelope on the hardest problems.

RESPONSIBILITIES

This is a highly leveraged role with cross-portfolio impact. You will identify research opportunities across customers, direct research efforts, and ensure research outcomes drive real business value.

• Work with EPMs and customer stakeholders across multiple clients to identify where research can unlock significant value.

• Translate ambiguous business problems into concrete research questions and prioritize what the research team should work on.

• Partner with researchers to define research strategies, set milestones, and ensure research stays connected to customer needs.

• Design pathways for research outcomes to reach production, working with EPMs and Applied AI Engineers on evaluation frameworks and integration strategies.

• Identify patterns across engagements and abstract successful approaches into reusable methodologies.

• Communicate complex research concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders, helping customers understand the potential and limitations of cutting-edge AI.

• Create and maintain a portfolio-wide view of research priorities, balancing customer-specific needs with broader platform capabilities.

If you're excited about identifying the highest-leverage research problems across a portfolio of critical industries and ensuring that research creates real-world impact, let's chat.

PROFILES WE'VE SEEN THRIVE IN THIS ROLE

• Former researchers who want to shape research agendas and maximize the real-world impact of research rather than executing individual research projects.

• Technical product managers with research backgrounds who excel at translating between research teams and business stakeholders.

• Former founders from technical backgrounds who enjoy identifying high-leverage opportunities and directing technical efforts.

The list is by no means exhaustive and we intentionally do not want to limit ourselves to the experience above. That said, if any of the above does sound like you then we think you might love it here.

YOU MAY BE A GOOD FIT IF YOU

• Have deep technical understanding of ML/AI research, with the ability to evaluate research feasibility and impact.

• Have a proven track record of scoping and driving complex technical initiatives in ambiguous environments.

• Are motivated by high-leverage, cross-cutting problems that can unlock value across multiple customers and industries.

• Exhibit extreme agency and bias towards action. You are fundamentally a "so instead, I..." person.

• Have experience with LLMs and frontier AI research, or exceptional ability to quickly get up to speed.

• Can balance long-term research vision with near-term delivery needs and know when to push for research depth vs. pragmatic solutions.

We're working against an incredibly ambitious mission. It won't be easy but it may 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.

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.