Director of AI Data Solutions

Pearl • San Francisco, CA

16h • Remote

About The Position

Pearl (the parent company of JustAnswer) is building a category-defining enterprise business at the intersection of AI and professional human expertise. One of our most important bets is AI Human Data Services: Expert data products that accelerate frontier model development - data that goes beyond generic labeling and commodity reinforcement learning through human feedback (RLHF) into high-signal, professional-grade work that materially improves model behavior.

AI labs are moving from models that “know things” to models that “do things.” That shift demands training and evaluation data that is harder, longer-horizon, and more domain-specific: PhD-level human evaluations, expert preference selection, verifiers, rubrics, agentic task environments, and multimodal workflows. Pearl is uniquely positioned to win here because we have a large, liquid network of licensed professionals (>20,000 professionals), an operating platform built for high-trust expert work over the last 20 years, and multimodal production capabilities across chat, voice, and computer-use style tasks.

We need a AI data service entrepreneur/intraprenuer to discover where we can have maximum product-market fit and then build on early AI Data Services traction to build a durable product line: a repeatable set of data offerings, a world-class quality and evaluation system, and a delivery engine that frontier labs trust with their most important training and evaluation problems. This is not a quota-carrying sales role. It’s a product-and-operations leadership role with deep customer intimacy - owning the end-to-end data product lifecycle from discovery to specification to production to quality to expansion.

We believe the ideal leader is someone who has either:

Owned procurement / partnerships for custom AI training or evaluation data inside a major AI lab (or equivalent model-building org), or
Successfully brought to market high-end custom data programs at a leading data provider (e.g., Scale, Appen, Handshake, or similar), with firsthand experience of what differentiates “elite” data from commodity output

Requirements

• AI data procurement/partnerships at a frontier lab, data product leadership, data operations, ML research operations, or senior roles at an AI data provider delivering custom programs.
• Demonstrated experience building or operating high-quality human-data programs (SFT, preference data, evals, verifiers, rubric-driven QA).
• Strong technical intuition: comfortable working with ML researchers and engineers on dataset specs, formats, and evaluation methodology (you don’t need to be an ML engineer, but you must be credible).
• Strong contract and vendor maturity: familiarity with data rights, licensing, confidentiality constraints, and what “labs-grade” trust requires.
• Comfort operating in high-ambiguity, high-velocity environments with lean start-up methods, and clear articulation of what Pearl does better than anyone else.
• Smart, fun, get-things-done.

Responsibilities

• Define and productize our AI Data Services portfolio (what we sell, how it’s packaged, how it’s priced, what “done” means).
• Build the delivery engine: staffing, workflows, tooling, QA loops, and automation that make elite data repeatable.
• Establish Pearl’s quality bar and measurement system: rubrics, verifiers, audits, gold sets, calibration, and continuous performance scoring for experts and outputs.
• Own customer outcomes: translate ambiguous research needs into precise task designs and production-ready specs that reliably improve models.
• Build data rights and licensing strategy in partnership with Legal: ensure we can responsibly reuse and monetize data across customers when appropriate, while honoring confidentiality, privacy, and contractual commitments.
• Create Pearl’s external credibility in expert data: benchmarks, evaluation frameworks, and clearly articulated standards.

What This Job Offers

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