No information about remote work conditions has been provided for this job.
Type of contract for this position: Permanent contract
The position
Job description
As Head of Technical Program Management for Applied AI, you will drive and own all project execution, customer outcomes, and delivery excellence across LILT’s Applied AI practice for the world’s leading AI labs
Serving as builder and coach, you will lead the people, operations, and systems behind every Applied AI engagement — multilingual and multimodal training data, evaluations, and benchmark programs — and make sure each one ships on time, on budget, and to the highest quality bar
You are responsible for constructing LILT’s technical program management capabilities from the ground up while actively developing, mentoring, and elevating a high-performing team
Operating at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and industrial-scale execution, you hold total accountability for every customer engagement —ensuring every deliverable across your entire team meets the highest standards of precision, speed, and technical rigour
This is an operator’s role: you will balance high-stakes operational ownership with a builder and coach mindset
You will manage and run a high-volume, high-velocity delivery organization: Technical Program Managers, project managers, and the expert and vendor workforces behind them
You bring equal passion to building the operational systems and cadence, capacity models, quality systems, and execution frameworks that power our AI lab deliverables, and coaching your team to operate as high-agency “CEOs” of their respective customer portfolios, all while staying close enough to the work to step into a critical program or a customer escalation when it matters
You are technically fluent enough to partner with researchers and engineers, but your edge is turning complex, ambiguous customer requirements into reliable, repeatable delivery
While you empower your team to drive day-to-day execution, the buck stops with you for overall portfolio health, customer retention, program SLAs, and delivery outcomes
Serve as the single point of accountability for customer outcomes across all Applied AI programs — technical delivery, project work and timelines, quality SLAs, margin, and customer satisfaction. You own top-line program success metrics, quality SLAs, delivery timelines, and customer satisfaction across all Applied AI projects
Recruit, mentor, and scale a world-class team of TPMs and project managers. Set clear goals, coach for ownership, unblock across complex technical and operational challenges, and build a team that runs complex programs independently
Own capacity planning, staffing, and resource allocation across programs. Turn shifting customer demand into reliable production plans and delivery forecasts that protect speed and margin
Standardize intake, scoping, kickoff, quality control, reporting, and close-out. Turn individual program learnings into repeatable playbooks, systems, processes, and dashboards
Act as executive partner and delivery sponsor for key frontier AI lab relationships. Proactively co-develop benchmark transcreations with customer research leads. Lead escalations, run business reviews, and help shape scope, pricing, and timelines with Sales
Partner with Research to standardize quality control across delivery, including embedded calibration, gold sets, inter-annotator agreement, LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, model eval pipelines and root-cause analysis into every customer program, ensuring that quality issues are proactively controlled and mitigated
Work with Expert Supply and Operations to qualify, manage, and engage multilingual contributors and vendors, with clear performance and cost metrics
Design, build, and optimize scalable program frameworks for text, image, video, and audio modalities. Turn complex technical requirements into seamless operational realities, bridging Sales, Engineering, Research, Product, Production, and Engineering to scope and build project workflows that are designed optimally, launched quickly, and executed smoothly
Benefits
Medical Benefits: Employees receive coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance, plus FSA/DFSA, HSA, and Commuter benefits. In addition, LILT pays for basic life insurance, short-term disability, and long-term disability
Monthly lifestyle benefit stipend via the Fringe platform to allow employees to customize benefits to their lifestyle
Paid parental leave is provided after 6 months
Compensation: Meaningful equity, 401(k) matching, and flexible time off plus company holidays
Preferred experience
Proven track record as the final owner of large-scale, mission-critical technical portfolios, with direct accountability for project delivery, customer outcomes, and SLA adherence
Demonstrated experience architecting mitigations for AI-specific operational risks (e.g., dataset contamination, domain drift, quality decay, and SLA vulnerabilities)
Hands-on experience delivering AI training data, human data, LLM evaluation, annotation, or localization programs at scale, with distributed contributor or vendor workforces
Working knowledge of the modern AI landscape (LLMs, multimodal models, training and evaluation pipelines) to partner credibly with researchers and engineers
Excellent business acumen, executive presence, and communication style with experience building high-trust partnerships with top-tier AI labs, customers, and enterprise executive teams
Proven track record of building technical program functions, processes, and systems from scratch, coupled with a deep dedication to coaching, mentoring, and growing talent
Comfortable using SQL, spreadsheets, or BI tools to run the business on metrics such as throughput, quality, cost per task, and utilization
Deep, hands-on understanding of the modern AI landscape—including LLMs, multimodal models, training/inference pipelines, and complex dataset diversity (multilingual and multi-domain)
Proven ownership of a large, customer-facing delivery portfolio with accountability for SLAs, quality, and margin
5+ years of direct people management experience building and scaling TPM, Product, or Engineering teams within high-growth AI or enterprise tech environments
10+ years in delivery, operations, or program leadership, including 5+ years managing managers or multi-team delivery organizations
Experience leading globally distributed teams across time zones
B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, AI, or a related technical field with 12+ years of industry experience (or Ph.D. with 8+ years)
Experience at an AI data, human data, or language services company, or delivering for frontier AI labs
Familiarity with Python and modern program tooling (e.g., Linear, Jira, custom analytics) to automate reporting and workflows
Demonstrated ability to build operating systems in high-velocity startup environments and scale them to support high-throughput, mission-critical operations where quality control is paramount
Fluency in multiple human languages
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