Deployment Lead

Labelbox • San Francisco, CA

12h • Hybrid

About The Position

Labelbox is seeking a Deployment Lead to own the successful delivery of complex customer programs. This senior, customer-facing role involves translating customer requirements into execution plans, coordinating internal workstreams, managing deployment economics, and ensuring projects meet quality, throughput, delivery, and margin commitments. The Deployment Lead operates at the intersection of customer relationship management, technical program management, and operational/financial execution. They must understand technical requirements to pressure-test implementation plans and communicate tradeoffs, while also owning the unit economics to protect margin. This role is the operations and margin lead for the customer team, partnering with the General Manager who owns the broader customer relationship and growth. The Deployment Lead is the primary point of accountability for the delivery of a major customer or portfolio of projects and serves as the customer's point of contact for delivery-related issues. They coordinate Technical Program Managers and Forward Deployed Engineers, ensuring workstreams are properly staffed, technically sound, and aligned with customer objectives. This role is equivalent in seniority to a TPM Manager but with a stronger emphasis on customer ownership, deployment success, and margin, serving as a senior destination on the TPM track and a potential pathway to a General Manager role.

Requirements

• Significant experience owning complex, cross-functional programs in a customer-facing environment — as an operator who has run things, not advised on them.
• Financial and commercial numeracy: comfort owning margin, building and reading the unit economics of a program, and making the call to protect it.
• Strong technical fluency and the ability to quickly understand complex systems, workflows, and implementation requirements.
• Ability to communicate credibly with technical customer stakeholders while translating technical detail into clear decisions for non-technical audiences.
• A track record of partnering effectively with engineers, program managers, and cross-functional operators.
• Excellent judgment: you can distinguish technical issues from execution issues from customer-management issues, and find the right path to resolution.
• A strong track record of delivering against ambitious timelines while holding a high bar for quality.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous environments where requirements evolve and processes are still being built.
• Strong operational instincts, a bias toward action, and attention to detail across multiple projects at once.

Nice To Haves

• Background in consulting, banking, private equity/VC, or an operating role where you owned a P&L or a hard number.
• Experience deploying technical products, services, or data-intensive programs.
• Familiarity with AI, machine learning, data pipelines, or RL/evaluation work.
• Experience working directly with forward-deployed engineers, solutions engineers, or implementation teams.
• Experience managing strategic accounts with multiple parallel workstreams.
• Experience building repeatable operating systems for a rapidly scaling organization.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end deployment of projects for one or more major customers, from initial scoping and technical design through launch and ongoing execution — accountable for throughput, quality, delivery, and margin.
• Own the economics of deployments: instrument margin live, manage the cost-to-revenue picture across the account's projects, and make in-flight calls (comp structure, staffing, project structure) that protect it.
• Serve as the customer's primary point of contact for delivery — timelines, technical requirements, risks, and operational performance.
• Develop a detailed understanding of each customer's technical requirements: system constraints, integrations, data flows, workflows, and acceptance criteria.
• Translate customer requirements into clear project plans, milestones, owners, success metrics, and a margin model.
• Ensure the account's projects move through their gates — calibration before scaling, staged ramp, delivery acceptance — so quality and margin hold across the portfolio.
• Work closely with FDEs, TPMs, and FDRs to validate implementation plans, manage dependencies, and ensure technical decisions support the customer's goals and the deployment's economics.
• Coordinate TPMs and FDEs across multiple concurrent projects, maintaining a clear view of progress, staffing, risk, margin, and cross-project dependencies — and ensure projects are staffed from the pools and the data-trainer workforce is sized and productive via TPMs and Pod Leads.
• Communicate technical and economic tradeoffs and implementation risks clearly to customer stakeholders and internal teams.
• Identify risks early, establish mitigation plans, and escalate when timelines, technical feasibility, quality, or margin are at risk.
• Partner with FDEs, FDRs, the Talent/Crowd team, the GM, and platform teams to unblock execution.
• Establish the operating cadence, dashboards, and escalation paths that create visibility and accountability — and improve deployment playbooks as the organization scales.

Benefits

• Career advancement opportunities directly tied to your impact
• The expected annual base salary range for United States-based candidates is $200,000 - $230,000 USD. This range is not inclusive of any potential equity packages or additional benefits.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed