Program Launch Manager

About Convergent Research

Convergent Research is a nonprofit science studio best known for pioneering the Focused Research Organization (FRO). We design, launch, and support mission-driven, time-bound organizations built to solve important scientific and engineering bottlenecks.

FROs are designed to tackle the kinds of problems that benefit from unusual levels of focus, coordination, and scale. Convergent provides the operational backbone that allows FRO teams to move quickly—from legal formation, funding, hiring, finance, and governance to partnerships, communications, and operational systems.

We’ve now taken 14 FROs from idea to operating entity, including four launches in 2026. And we’re not slowing down.

About the Role

Turning an ambitious scientific idea into a functioning organization requires a lot more than good science.

There are entities to form, teams to hire, systems to stand up, funders and partners to coordinate, decisions to make, and approximately one million details that need to happen in the right order. At the same time, the founders doing this work are often building an organization for the first time.

That’s where you come in.

As our Program Launch Manager , you’ll sit at the center of the FRO lifecycle. You’ll help promising scientific projects become functioning organizations while also running large-scale founder programs that develop the next generation of FROs.

You’ll be part project manager, part operator, and part trusted partner. One minute you might be building a launch plan across legal, finance, people, and IT. The next, you’re helping a scientist understand an unfamiliar operational decision, chasing down a dependency that could delay launch, or making sure a founder residency participant has what they need to make progress.

This isn’t a traditional project-management or account-management role. Our systems and playbooks are still evolving, and every FRO is different. You’ll need to bring structure without creating bureaucracy, keep things moving without losing sight of the people involved, and turn what we learn from every launch into a better system for the next one.

You Are (Skills):

-
A project manager who can make ambiguity actionable. Give you a complicated goal with multiple teams, unclear dependencies, and a moving timeline, and you can turn it into a practical plan. You know who owns what, what needs to happen next, where the risks are, and which decisions are holding everything else up.

-
Operationally rigorous. You notice the details that matter. You keep accurate records, follow through reliably, and know that a small operational gap today can become a much larger problem three weeks from now.

-
People-centered and emotionally intelligent. Launching an organization can be exciting, confusing, stressful, and occasionally all three before lunch. You build trust quickly, meet people where they are, and know when to coach, facilitate, advise, push, or simply listen.

-
A confident, clear, proactive communicator. You can run an effective meeting, write a concise status update, ask the uncomfortable-but-important question, and translate complicated processes into something another human can actually understand. You’re equally comfortable working with scientists, founders, executives, vendors, funders, and functional specialists.

-
Comfortable with ambiguity. You’ve worked somewhere entrepreneurial—perhaps a startup, nonprofit, consultancy, research organization, or similar environment—where not every process came with an instruction manual. You bring structure while recognizing that the right answer may be different for every FRO.

-
A fan of functional systems. After doing something manually for the fifth time, you start wondering whether there’s a better way. You like turning bespoke work into useful processes, templates, documentation, and operating rhythms—and you’re interested in using automation and AI thoughtfully when they can make those systems be