Head of Data

Head of Data Operations: Frontier AI Lab

Palo Alto (Hybrid)

Our client is building general-purpose, multimodal AI systems that learn to predict and interact with the world in real time. Think of it as teaching AI to understand physics, motion, and environments the way humans do, then letting you step inside and interact with it. Their latest model holds the highest physics score among the evaluated world models and runs in real time. This isn't incremental. It's a new medium. The entire frontier rests on the data.

Head of Data Ops, hands-on, with tens of millions of budget behind you.

The role

• You'll own the entire data supply chain for the company's world models, from defining what multimodal data is needed, to acquiring and quality-assuring it, to ensuring the right composition reaches research and product teams.
• Gaming data is well-resourced. Robotics data needs to be built up. You'll close the partnerships, source the right mix across video, audio, egocentric capture, and robotic sensor data, and decide what gets bought, licensed, or collected from scratch.
• You'll manage a data acquisition and processing budget in the tens of millions, and grow the function from a small team today into an organisation that could scale to hundreds of people.
• This is a strategic role, but a hands-on one. At our client, everyone reads papers and everyone codes; ops is a technical function.

What you'll do

• Define and execute the data acquisition strategy across multimodal sources
• Close 3 to 5 meaningful new data partnerships in the first year
• Own the data mix.
• Build a gap-identification loop with research and engineering.
• Build and scale the data organisation.
• Make real trade-offs across sources, quality, and speed.

What you bring

• Deep, hands-on experience with multimodal video data.
• Research-calibre technical depth. You've written or contributed to a research paper, and you deeply understand world models and reinforcement learning data requirements.
• 5 years leading data operations, data sourcing, or a closely adjacent function at a frontier AI lab, robotics company, or similarly technically demanding environment.
• Strong commercial instincts; a track record of closing data deals.
• Experience building and scaling data organisations from a small team to 50 people.
• A strong perspective on what the data operation should look like.

Bonus points for direct robotics data experience or Head of Data Ops experience at a GenAI or Frontier AI Research Lab.

This is a chance to own the data lever at a company where the models are learning to simulate reality itself. The data you bring in directly determines what the frontier looks like.