Speculative Technologies is searching for a project manager to manage the operations of a new accelerator for scientists who want to bring ambitious ideas into existence, through novel institutions outside of academia and startups. It’s an exciting role for a people-wrangling project manager who loves science and wants to help bring more awesome things into the world.

How you’ll spend your time

You will be responsible for overall operations of a first-time accelerator and training program. So from a nuts-and-bolts perspective, you will be setting up communications systems, organizing resources, coordinating events, and helping scientists and mentors connect with each other and get through the program effectively. But since this is the first time we are doing this, you will also be helping us figure out how a program like this should best work. You will be expected to find better ways to do things, implement them, and tell us how we could be doing better.

When

This is a full-time position, but a term-limited one! We would like to hire you for the length of the first cycle of our Brains accelerator program, which will run from January through April. Ideally, the project manager will work with us from December 2023 through May 2024. It is possible that this position will extend into a full-time permanent position, but that can’t be guaranteed.

Where

This is a continental-US remote position, with the expectation that you will travel (at our expense) to two in-person meetings within the US; one in January and one in April 2024.

You:

• Love science, and ideally have a scientific background at the college or graduate level
• Have had at least a few years of project management experience as part of a full-time job, even if that wasn’t your job title
• Feel physical pain in the presence of an inefficient process
• Love working with people, and helping people, even if that has to be over Zoom and Slack sometimes
• Enjoy figuring out new software and putting it to use
• Are a US citizen or permanent resident (sorry, we can’t sponsor a visa for this position)

Why you might not like this role

This isn’t a traditional project management role! You will not be following the PMP bible, and you would need to be ok with that. This is also not a technical project management role and there will be no JIRA.

We are a small non-profit organization and so there isn’t a lot of structure and we like it that way. If you like navigating big organizations, this will feel very strange to you! This role will feel a lot more like an early start-up job.

About Us

Speculative Technologies (spec.tech) is a nonprofit research organization that runs coordinated research programs to unlock big-if-true materials and manufacturing technologies that are too speculative for startups but too engineering- or coordination-heavy for a single academic lab.