Strategic Projects Lead

About the role

You will own Paraform's most complex and highest-impact customer engagements from initial scoping through successful delivery and renewal. You will act as the central nervous system connecting sales, supply, engineering, and operations to ensure marketplace capacity aligns with client demand. In this role, you will translate ambiguous executive ambitions into concrete, executable hiring strategies that de-risk growth for fast-moving teams. You will bring judgment and structure to senior decision-makers while challenging assumptions and pushing back when necessary to protect long-term value. You will operate simultaneously as a trusted advisor, a hands-on coordinator, and a strategic problem-solver across fluid environments. Every day you will build credibility with founders, CXOs, and senior operators and drive outcomes that matter to their timelines and to Paraform's reliability. You will directly influence how Paraform's product and delivery model evolve to support increasingly sophisticated marketplace demands. This role is designed for individuals who thrive at the intersection of revenue, execution, and product thinking in a scaling marketplace.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Own customer engagements end-to-end, building credibility with founders, CXOs, and senior operators and driving execution across complex, high-stakes searches while using data to influence hiring outcomes.
• Leverage Paraform's recruiter capacity by translating customer needs into precise briefs and mobilizing the right recruiters to ensure consistently strong outcomes that drive retention and long-term partnerships.
• Serve as the voice of the customer within Paraform, advocating for a truly differentiated experience and feeding insight across the business to influence when needed to drive the best possible outcomes.
• Shape how delivery evolves by leading strategic projects that influence how Paraform shows up for customers as the business scales, partnering closely with sales, supply, product, and engineering.
• Partner closely with founders, executives, and senior talent leaders to solve their most critical business problem, which is building world-class teams at speed while managing risk and compliance constraints.
• Coordinate across the marketplace to balance demand with supply, aligning recruiter capacity, AI tooling, and operational processes to hit quality, speed, and consistency targets.
• Identify patterns across engagements and translate emerging themes into actionable product and process improvements for the marketplace.
• Manage multiple work streams and priorities at once, applying exceptional 80/20 judgment to focus effort on the highest-leverage activities.
• Build and document playbooks for complex engagements to ensure consistency, repeatability, and scalability as the customer base grows rapidly.
• Use qualitative and quantitative signals to forecast hiring pipeline health and to proactively manage risks that could derail critical timelines.
• Collaborate with data and product teams to define metrics that reflect marketplace health and to test hypotheses that improve conversion and retention.
• Represent Paraform in external discussions with senior stakeholders, demonstrating deep domain knowledge and structured problem-solving under ambiguity.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience, with a foundation in both problem-solving (e.g., consulting / MBB) and growth/revenue-focused operator roles (e.g., category management, partnerships, new verticals, GM) or 2+ years of experience working closely with customers and having full ownership across relevant areas such as operations, strategic projects, or account management.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication, with the ability to synthesize complex information into clear narratives for executives and operators.
• Entrepreneurial experience and mindset, where you are excited about building things from scratch, able to identify issues, and execute quickly without needing perfect conditions.
• Ability to come up with creative solutions to complex, ambiguous operational problems and resourceful in identifying opportunities and executing against them with limited guidance.
• Ability to manage multiple work streams and priorities at once, demonstrating exceptional 80/20 prioritization and follow-through in a fast-moving environment.
• Comfort operating in high-ambiguity settings where processes are not yet standardized and decisions must be made with incomplete information.
• Strong judgment and maturity to handle sensitive client situations and confidential information with professionalism.
• Drive to learn new domains quickly, including defense-tech, enterprise software, and other regulated or specialized industries.

Nice to have

• Experience working with startups, scale-ups, and mission-driven organizations that move quickly and make decisions with imperfect data.
• Background in marketplace operations, platform economics, or capacity management in two-sided networks.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted recruiting tools and how they can be integrated into delivery workflows.
• Track record of influencing cross-functional stakeholders without direct authority.
• Experience in highly regulated or security-sensitive hiring contexts such as defense, intelligence, or financial services.

Practical notes

• This is a full-time role based in San Francisco.
• The role may involve occasional travel to meet key customers or participate in industry events.
• Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship for this position.