--- title: 'Strategic Projects Lead at Chakra Labs' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-projects-lead-chakra-labs-brooklyn-52rvmpj8xb5b' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-11' --- # Strategic Projects Lead at Chakra Labs - **Company:** Chakra Labs - **Location:** Brooklyn, NY - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-08-28 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/chakra-labs/cfb94b5a-1cd6-4b9d-9f5b-e826d9a33189 ## Job description ## About Us Chakra Labs' mission is to encode human taste into intelligence. We build high-fidelity environments, evals, and datasets for frontier AI research, working with several of the top labs. Our work sits at the frontier of post-training, agent environments, data quality, and research infrastructure. We care about building systems that make models better in ways that are measurable, useful, and hard to fake. ## What You'd Work On The Strategic Projects Lead owns a customer project from end to end. This typically looks like taking a vague research goal from a lab to a delivered dataset a researcher actually trusts. It is the most operationally intense seat at Chakra and the one sitting closest to the customer. We are looking for someone that is able to deeply understand a given spec, own the relationship between a variety of stakeholders, and fulfill deliverables at a high quality bar. As an SPL you would: - Own multi-project delivery end to end, which may include scoping, contributor orchestration, quality assessment, and shipping. - Recruit and manage a pool of expert contributors who build gyms and trajectories. - Track and prioritize milestones for project completion in a space where requirements may shift overnight. - Assess delivery quality regularly before they are sent to a customer. This is a hands-on operations role, which involves a mix of strategy and product management. The work is specification, coordination, judgment, and follow-through at a rapid pace set by labs that want the data as soon as possible. ## About You - Operationally intense background. Consulting, banking, private equity, startup operations, ex-founder, or time in the human-data industry. Roughly 2+ years, but we can make exceptions. What matters is that you have experience with creating positive outcomes for customers on a deadline. - Technical-adjacent. You would spend time around trajectories, verifiers, and evals. - Taste, and the ability to defend it. You can look at a batch of work from experts and tell what's genuinely useful to a researcher versus what merely looks complete. - You lead through influence, not authority. Your contributors are experts with other priorities across time zones. None of them report to you. You get quality and pace out of them through clear specs, credibility, and follow-through. What Makes This Different - Your projects directly impact our business. You’ll be given project ownership from day one. You will have to think quickly, set priorities, and ship decisions that directly affect whether customers do business with us. - The customers are researchers, not business relations or procurement. Because you’re partnering directly with researchers, you’ll develop taste for the deeper model failures and the market dynamics driving them. - You’ll stay close to the cutting edge of frontier model research. Since you will be iterating on real deliverables (gyms, trajectories, and eval artifacts), you’ll build an intuitive sense for how the frontier is shifting. - The team. Our team is ex-Stripe, Snap, AWS, Microsoft, Airtable. You'll work with a small team who has years of shipping high-impact products over the last decade. ## About Chakra Labs ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Chakra Labs builds deterministic, pixel-perfect reinforcement learning environments and high-fidelity trajectory datasets to push the boundaries of frontier AI agent research. - **Entity Type**: Private (Venture-backed; $10.1M total funding) - **Headquarters**: Brooklyn, New York, United States (with presence in Australia and Nigeria) - **Founded**: Not publicly available (recent; rapid growth from ~4 to 15 employees in past year) - **Founders**: Nirmal Krishnan (Co-Founder, CEO), Alexander Fung (Co-Founder, CTO) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Data Infrastructure and Analytics / Frontier AI Research Infrastructure - **Target customers**: Frontier AI research teams, model developers, and applied research labs (B2B / Research) - **Mission or purpose**: To provide research-grade infrastructure for frontier-scale experiments where emergent behaviors develop, enabling reproducible and scientifically rigorous agent development. ## Products & Services - **[Dojo](https://www.chakra.dev/)**: A collaborative reinforcement learning (RL) environment suite for computer-use agents (CUAs). Supports frame-accurate state capture, deterministic execution, mixed-modality training (GUI + MCP tool-use), and bespoke task generation. Available via containerization for hosted or on-premises deployments. - **Trajectory Datasets**: Curated, high-fidelity datasets (2,500+ hours of trajectories) preserving temporal structure and decision trees, designed for post-training and evaluation. Access via request. - **GLADOS-1**: A computer-use agent model post-trained using crowd-sourced trajectories (announced Sep 2025). ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not disclosed - **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $10.1M (Venture Round, January 2026) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not explicitly named in available sources; collaborated with "leading research teams" - **Growth Signals**: 366.7% headcount growth year-over-year (from ~4 to 15 employees); strong traffic growth (+88.7% monthly visits); publications and thought leadership in RL environment design. ## Competitive Advantages - **Deterministic, pixel-perfect environments**: Frame-accurate state control and temporal integrity prevent reward hacking and ensure reproducible experiments. - **Mixed-modality training**: Simultaneous GUI interaction and programmatic tool-use within single tasks – a differentiator for multi-modal agent research. - **Bespoke task generation**: Automated creation of novel, verifiable tasks enabling experiments with extended autonomous runtime and error recovery. - **High-fidelity datasets**: Realistic, in-distribution trajectories that avoid synthetic edge cases, improving transfer learning to deployment. ## Strategic Focus - Building infrastructure for frontier-defining agent problems, with emphasis on scientific rigor, speed of iteration, and collaboration between humans and AI. - Expanding the Dojo platform and dataset offerings to support both hosted and on-premises deployments for leading research labs. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Small, high-impact team (15 people) composed of talent from Stripe, Jane Street, Alchemy, The Boring Company, and UNSW CompClub – emphasis on engineering excellence and research. - **Remote-first**: Employees work remotely with offices listed in the US (Brooklyn) and presence in Australia and Nigeria. - **Research environment**: Focus on open platform for RL environments, publications, and pushing capability boundaries – ideal for engineers and researchers passionate about AI agent infrastructure. - **Tech stack**: Modern tooling (notion for internal ops, containerized deployment via Harbor and Verl). ## Sources 1. [chakra.dev](https://www.chakra.dev/) 2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/chakra-labs](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/chakra-labs) 3. [linkedin.com/company/chakra-labs](https://www.linkedin.com/company/chakra-labs) 4. [builtin.com/company/chakra-labs](https://builtin.com/company/chakra-labs) 5. 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