About Working Paper
Working Paper is a policy-informed product management consultancy. We help clients build and ship solutions that work. We design for users while supporting the broad ecosystem of stakeholders that our solutions inevitably impact.
We take a normative view of technology: we believe how something gets built matters as much as what gets built. Our clients come to us when they need to ship ambitious work in complex, multi-stakeholder environments. We are at our most comfortable operating in spaces where a single product decision can implicate researchers, regulators, civil society, and the public. We bring the rigor of product management to policy problems and the sophistication of policy thinking to product challenges.
Our engagements are high impact. To give you examples of where we are working today:
- We lead product development, program management, and policy strategy for AI safety benchmarking at an independent non-profit, where we are actively shaping how industry measures and communicates AI risk.
- We are leading AI adoption and digital transformation work for a foundation that is coordinating a national research program to transform American schools.
- We are advising a foundation on which high value strategic investments to make — and leading the projects born of some of those investments — that support the broad philanthropic and grant making ecosystem.
We are a small, bespoke consulting firm that hires experts who want to do meaningful and impactful work. We are deliberate about keeping this structure. We take on work we believe in and are committed to doing well.
About the Role
We're hiring a Senior Consultant to join our delivery team. This is a client-facing role involving a hybrid of product, program, and policy management that is focused on execution: you'll manage complex projects, coordinate diverse stakeholders, and ensure work gets done on time and to a standard we can defend.
That last part is important. At Working Paper, "done" means more than delivered. It means we can explain to external stakeholders, especially the skeptical ones, why we made the decisions we made. Our work gets scrutinized by researchers, policymakers, and the public. Defensibility of decisions is a core competency.
You'll work across engagements that vary in domain but share common characteristics: technically complex, politically sensitive, involving coalitions of people who may not naturally agree. You might spend one week coordinating a benchmark and accompanying academic paper release and the next leading an AI infrastructure build out. What unites the work is the need for someone who can embrace complexity, build and maintain project momentum, and deliver high quality work products.
At our firm, strategy and delivery aren't separate functions — they are intertwined. We're not a consultancy that hands off a deck and walks away. We design the strategy and then build the thing, which means part of the job is figuring out what can actually ship. We scope deliverables to what's achievable, not just what's ideal. This role is client-forward, externally oriented, and accountable for outcomes.
What You'll Do
Manage project delivery across client engagements. You'll own timelines, dependencies, and deliverables. You'll keep distributed teams of researchers, engineers, policy experts, and client stakeholders aligned and on schedule. When things slip, you'll figure out why and course-correct.
Own product design and execution. You will work directly with users to understand the shape of their pain points and scope MVP solutions that we can then deliver and iterate on. We tend to begin engagements by running discovery sprints with the explicit intent of delivering the sprint report and a usable solution that is both informed by and responsive to that report.
Coordinate diverse stakeholder groups. Our clients operate in environments where industry, academia, civil society, and government all have legitimate interests. You'll help navigate those interests – not by finding the lowest common denominator, but by building coalitions around work that genuinely serves multiple constituencies.
Ensure defensibility of the work. You'll pressure-test decisions before they're made. You'll ask the uncomfortable questions early. You'll make sure that when we ship something, we can articulate clearly why we built it the way we did, with the understanding that the articulation will need to hold up to scrutiny.
Be the connective tissue between technical and non-technical teams. You won't need to write code (that said, we are enthusiastic vibe coders who have a deep appreciation for the limits of "what is actually vibe-codable"), but you'll need to understand what's technically feasible, what's hard, and what's being hand-waved. You'll translate between engineers and policymakers, researchers and executives. You'll prioritize based on real user and stakeholder needs.
Represent Working Paper to clients and external partners. This is an externally-oriented role. You'll be in the room with clients, on calls with partners, presenting work to stakeholders who matter. You'll need to project competence and build on the trust that Working Paper has established as a brand.
What We're Looking For
Technical literacy. You don't need to be an engineer, but you need to genuinely understand technical systems. When someone proposes a solution, you can assess whether it's plausible — or at least ask the right questions to make that determination. If a timeline is aggressive for technical delivery, you can understand why. You're comfortable in rooms where people are discussing ML models, data infrastructure, or privacy-enhancing technologies, even if you're not the one responsible for building them.
Experience managing complex, multi-stakeholder projects. You've coordinated work that involved people who report to different organizations, have different incentives, and don't naturally align. You've delivered outcomes in environments where no one has unilateral authority.
A bias toward rigor and defensibility. You instinctively ask "how would we explain this decision?" You're uncomfortable shipping work you can't justify. You care as much about getting things "reasonably correct" as you care about getting them done.
Judgment about people and process. You read rooms well and understand incentive structures and interpersonal dynamics. You know when to push and when to hold back. You can tell when a project is on track and when it's about to go off the rails — and you act accordingly.
Strong written and verbal communication. You write clearly. You synthesize complexity for different audiences. You can explain technical work to non-technical stakeholders and policy constraints to engineers.
Comfort with ambiguity. Our engagements don't come with detailed playbooks — we are usually hired to write the playbooks. You'll need to figure out the right approach as you go, adapting to each client's context and needs.
Especially Valuable
We don't require any of these, but they'd make you a stronger candidate:
- Experience in AI safety, AI governance, or responsible AI practices
- Background in research operations, particularly coordinating academic or cross-institutional research
- Familiarity with standards development processes (ISO, NIST, industry consortia)
- Knowledge of education systems, learning science, or education technology
- Healthcare or life sciences experience
- Social science research training or experience
- Experience at a technology platform company navigating policy and public affairs
Who You'll Work With
You'll report to Bennett Hillenbrand, President of Working Paper. You'll also work closely with Andrew Gruen, CEO. We're a small team. Collaboration is constant and hierarchy is minimal.
Why This Might Be the Right Role for You
You know that product management skills can be about so much more than "user growth" metrics. You've seen how technology can cause harm when it's built without regard for broader consequences — and you've seen how it can create genuine good when it's built thoughtfully and in collaboration with the humans it impacts. You want to work on things that matter, with people who care about getting them right. We also try to be smart and fun, with varying degrees of success. You're looking for a place that values rigor without bureaucracy, ambition without ego, and impact without compromise.