Program Manager - Research

About FirstPrinciples

FirstPrinciples is building AI to accelerate scientific discovery. Our core product is the Theo Platform, a research environment built to help researchers iterate faster, validate rigorously, and reach verified results they can trust.

We're a fast-growing, remote-first team of builders, researchers, engineers, and thinkers working across Canada, the US, the UK, and expanding globally. What brings us together is a shared curiosity about how the universe works, and a belief that we can build systems that help us explore it more effectively.

We spend our time working on questions that don't have clear answers, like how to design AI that can reason through scientific problems, and how the scientific process as a whole might evolve. This is work that sits somewhere between creativity and rigorous thinking, and often requires comfort with ambiguity and iteration. If you're someone who enjoys tackling big, abstract problems and exploring ideas that don't yet have a defined path forward, you'll likely find the work here interesting.

Why This Role Exists:

We’re building AI systems at the frontier of scientific discovery, which means research is fundamental to our product advantage. But great research is not just about generating interesting ideas, it’s about directing our time, talent, and compute toward the work most likely to create meaningful scientific and product progress.

This role exists to bring strong product discipline to research execution. You’ll help researchers turn open-ended exploration into clearly framed bets, define how we measure progress and ROI, and create the operating rhythms that let us learn quickly. You’ll push promising work forward with urgency, surface weak signals early, and help teams change direction when an approach is no longer earning its investment.

Your impact will help Research maximize its pace in the organization - more ambitious in what it pursues, more rigorous in how it evaluates progress, and accountable for turning research investment into real product capabilities and breakthroughs.

What You’ll Do:

• Partner with research leads to define clear research programs, priorities, hypotheses, milestones, and expected outcomes

• Operationalize and steward our Research Portfolio & ROI Framework - assessing research bets by ambition, uncertainty, impact, maturity, time horizon, confidence, cost, and product applicability at the program and portfolio level

• Establish stage-appropriate evidence plans, KPIs, and leading and lagging indicators for research projects, including signals that increase or reduce confidence, validate progress, or decisively kill a direction

• Create operating rhythms that increase the pace of Research: regular reviews, clear owners, intermediate deliverables, decision points, and tight follow-through

• Track research initiatives against their objectives and investment, keeping teams accountable for progress while preserving room for genuine scientific exploration

• Identify stalled projects, weak assumptions, and diminishing returns early, and drive explicit decisions to iterate, redirect, pause, or stop work rather than allowing projects to drift

• Connect research priorities to company, product, and technical strategy, ensuring the research portfolio reflects the capabilities and differentiated advantages we most need to build

• Translate research progress into clear decisions, implications, and tradeoffs for Product, Engineering, and leadership, while helping successful research transition into product capabilities, assets, or future strategic options

Who You Are:

• 5+ years as a product manager or program manager in technology or research organizations, comfortable operating in highly technical, ambiguous, and exploratory environments

• Educational Background: Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related technical field; ensuring you can comfortably debate technical tradeoffs.

• Deep understanding of program management craft and practices, with the ability to guide ambiguous technical programs, make evidence-based decisions under uncertainty, and apply product thinking where useful without constraining scientific exploration.

• Strong bias toward action and learning velocity, where you look for the fastest credible path to determining whether an idea deserves greater investment

• Comfortable holding highly technical teams accountable for commitments, decisions, and outcomes while earning trust through intellectual curiosity and sound judgment

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, and comfort working in a fast-paced startup environment with a remote-first team.

• Motivated by building a research culture that combines scientific ambition with urgency, focus, accountability, and a relentless desire to learn faster

What You’ll Get:

• The opportunity to work on foundational problems at the intersection of AI and physics

• A high-trust, low-bureaucracy environment with real ownership

• Remote-first work with flexibility in how you structure your day

• Exposure to cutting-edge ideas across AI, scientific discovery, and emerging technologies

• A culture that values curiosity, depth of thinking, and first-principles reasoning

• The chance to contribute to work aimed at advancing fundamental science