Special Projects Operator
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Sep 30, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 6, 2026.
About idler
idler is a frontier data research lab. We build the evals and environments that the world's leading frontier labs use to measure and train their models.
After raising a $9m seed round led by Paradigm, we spent the last year developing coding evals for top coding models you know and love. At the same time, we've expanded into other domains besides coding: RSI & Auto-Research, Law, Enterprise Business, Cybersecurity, and others. Now, we are facing more lab demand for our data than we can serve, and are rapidly scaling the team to grow the business.
Our approach to creating training data scales using technology, and all of our data products are built on a unified self-reinforcing platform that learns through experience.
You would be joining a close-knit team that has reached product market fit, and your work would directly help to multiply our revenue.
You can see some of our work here: https://idler.ai/collections
About the Role
Special Projects Operators are responsible for the relationships and the operations that connect our network of experts to our data production. As an SPO, you will recruit, onboard, and manage our experts, and you will build the systems and tooling to automate your recruitment and management processes. This role is half project management, half engineering.
If you want to start a company one day, this is a good place to learn how.
In this role, you will:
Recruit experts into our network - find the communities they belong to, build relationships within those communities, and bring the best people on board.
Design our expert hiring process - work with our research team to build the screening rubric for each new domain, run it, and automate as much of it as you can.
Run the network day to day - onboard experts, schedule them onto projects, fill gaps when someone drops out, check the quality of their work, run the payment cycle, and answer the support inbox.
Build the tooling the network runs on - replace the manual steps in applications, qualification, scheduling, scoring, payments, and reporting, and improve how our team and our experts communicate.
Keep the paperwork organized - run payroll tasks, file compliance documents, and provision and remove accounts.
What we value
Scrappiness with people - you find the person who knows the person, and you are comfortable approaching a community you are not yet part of.
Grit, coupled with good judgement - you're comfortable operating in ambiguous, high-intensity environments. You're independent and resourceful, but you know when you should ask for help before acting.
Meticulous attention to detail - you would rather find and fix the problems in your work than let someone else discover them for you.
Requirements
One to four years in an operationally intense environment, or an exceptional record as a new graduate.
Ability (and enthusiasm) to build your own tools with AI assistance. A professional engineering background is not required, but you must be able to read the documentation and get something working unaided.
Extraordinary literacy, as evidenced by written and verbal communication. You will write to experts, to partners, and to us.
A high tolerance for ambiguity, intensity, and sustained effort when the problem demands it.
You might excel if you…
Have earned a place in a community you started outside of, and can explain how you did it.
Throw events, or host often, and know how to make people want to show up.
Come from a high-pressure, metrics-driven field like consulting or banking, where you had to be presentable and hit numbers at the same time.
Details
In-person in San Francisco
Competitive salary + meaningful equity
Free meals in office
Healthcare, 401(k), 15 days of PTO per year
Relocation assistance
Small, ambitious team
This is an in-person role in San Francisco. We're a tight-knit founding team and we play to win. Join us if you like to win too.