Strategic Program & Ops Lead (Data Projects)

Title: Strategic Program & Operations Lead (Data Projects)

Location: San Francisco, CA
Company Stage: Seed-funded startup (Raised $2M at $30M valuation)
Office Type: On-site, 5 days a week
Salary: $150K–$250K significant equity

Company Description

Our client is a fast-growing, venture-backed AI startup on a mission to redefine how artificial intelligence understands taste, quality, and creativity. The company collaborates with leading AI research labs to build the next generation of models that can recognize and produce content that truly feels great — across domains like design, writing, tone, and emotion.

Backed by top-tier investors and angel supporters from pioneering AI and design organizations, the company is led by experienced founders from world-class tech firms. With a small, high-performing team of experts from companies like Palantir, Exa, and Mercado Libre, this is an opportunity to join early and help shape a foundational layer of the creative AI ecosystem.

What You Will Do

As the Strategic Program & Operations Lead (Data Projects), you’ll own the delivery of high-impact data projects that bridge creative judgment with model training. You’ll collaborate across research, engineering, and operations to design, execute, and scale data pipelines for subjective domains such as design, tone, and style.

Your role will combine strategy, product thinking, and hands-on operational excellence. You’ll:

• Partner with research and engineering to define and manage data pipelines, labeling criteria, QA processes, and evaluation workflows.

• Coordinate with growth and community teams to recruit and manage expert human evaluators (“taste-makers”).

• Develop and enforce quality standards for subjective datasets — setting the bar for what “great” looks like in AI-generated outputs.

• Serve as the main point of contact for AI lab clients, managing communication, feedback, and iteration cycles.

• Identify process gaps and work with engineering to design tools that make these data operations scalable and efficient.

Example Projects:

• Building a dataset for UI design quality benchmarking with a frontier AI lab.

• Designing a tone and writing evaluation workflow for model expressiveness.

• Creating multi-stage QA loops for large-scale personality and emotional datasets.

Ideal Candidate Background

• 2–5 years of experience in operations, program management, or product operations, ideally within AI, data labeling, or research-heavy startups.

• Proven experience managing complex human data or ML-related projects.

• Strong understanding of how datasets, formats, and feedback loops influence model performance.

• Technically fluent — comfortable reading or discussing data schemas, prompts, or small code snippets.

• Methodical, detail-oriented, and able to thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous, and high-agency environments.

• Deep personal interest in creative fields such as art, design, writing, or fashion — with an intuitive sense for “taste.”

Preferred

• Prior experience working at a data-centric or AI infrastructure company (e.g., Scale AI, Labelbox, Surge AI, Snorkel AI, etc.).

• Experience designing or managing subjective evaluation pipelines (pairwise ranking, rubric-based evaluation, or similar).

• Experience partnering directly with research or model training teams.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base Salary: $150K–$250K, commensurate with experience

• Equity: 0.1%–0.5% (significant early-stage ownership)

• Visa Sponsorship: Available for qualified candidates

• On-site Perks: Collaborative workspace in San Francisco’s Jackson Square district

• Impact: Join as one of the first five hires — with direct influence over company direction, product quality, and culture

Why This Opportunity is Exciting

• Work directly with frontier AI labs on cutting-edge, creative data challenges.

• Shape how models learn quality, emotion, and style — the next frontier in AI understanding.

• Join a small, elite team where your decisions drive massive impact.

• Perfect role for someone who thrives at the intersection of art, technology, and strategy.