Head of Technical Program Management, Applied AI

LILT

20h • $191,000 - $250,000

About The Position

The Head of Technical Program Management for Applied AI owns project execution, customer outcomes, and delivery excellence across LILT’s Applied AI practice serving leading AI labs. This builder-and-coach role leads the people, operations, and systems supporting multilingual and multimodal training data, evaluations, and benchmark programs, ensuring engagements are delivered on time, on budget, and to a high quality standard. The position is accountable for customer engagements, portfolio health, customer retention, program SLAs, and delivery outcomes.

The role builds LILT’s technical program management capabilities and leads a high-volume, high-velocity delivery organization that includes technical program managers, project managers, and expert and vendor workforces. It establishes operational cadence, capacity models, quality systems, execution frameworks, and repeatable delivery processes while developing a team capable of independently managing complex customer portfolios. The role partners with researchers, engineers, Sales, and other functions, and may step into critical programs or customer escalations when needed.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in delivery, operations, or program leadership.
• 5+ years managing managers or multi-team delivery organizations.
• Track record as the final owner of large-scale, mission-critical technical portfolios, with direct accountability for delivery, customer outcomes, and SLA adherence.
• Experience owning a large customer-facing delivery portfolio with accountability for SLAs, quality, and margin.
• Experience building technical program functions, processes, and systems from scratch, alongside a commitment to coaching, mentoring, and developing talent.
• 5+ years of direct people management experience building and scaling TPM, Product, or Engineering teams in high-growth AI or enterprise technology environments.
• Deep, hands-on understanding of the AI landscape, including LLMs, multimodal models, training and inference pipelines, and multilingual and multi-domain datasets.
• Hands-on experience delivering AI training data, human data, LLM evaluation, annotation, or localization programs at scale with distributed contributor or vendor workforces.
• Experience building operating systems in high-velocity startup environments and scaling them to high-throughput, mission-critical operations where quality control is paramount.
• Comfort using SQL, spreadsheets, or BI tools to manage metrics such as throughput, quality, cost per task, and utilization.
• Working knowledge of modern AI, including LLMs, multimodal models, and training and evaluation pipelines, to partner credibly with researchers and engineers.
• Strong business acumen, executive presence, and communication skills, with experience building high-trust partnerships with top-tier AI labs, customers, and enterprise executive teams.
• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, AI, or a related technical field with 12+ years of industry experience, or a Ph.D. with 8+ years of industry experience.

Nice To Haves

• Experience at an AI data, human data, or language services company, or delivering for frontier AI labs.
• Experience leading globally distributed teams across time zones.
• Familiarity with Python and modern program tooling such as Linear, Jira, or custom analytics to automate reporting and workflows.
• Fluency in multiple human languages.

Responsibilities

• Own customer outcomes across Applied AI programs, including technical delivery, project work and timelines, quality SLAs, margin, and customer satisfaction.
• Recruit, mentor, and scale a team of technical program managers and project managers; set goals, coach ownership, and help resolve technical and operational challenges.
• Own capacity planning, staffing, and resource allocation across programs, translating changing customer demand into production plans and forecasts that protect speed and margin.
• Standardize program intake, scoping, kickoff, quality control, reporting, and close-out; turn program learnings into repeatable playbooks, systems, processes, and dashboards.
• Serve as an executive partner and delivery sponsor for key AI lab relationships; co-develop benchmark transcreations with customer research leads, lead escalations and business reviews, and help shape scope, pricing, and timelines with Sales.
• Partner with Research to standardize quality control, including calibration, gold sets, inter-annotator agreement, LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, model evaluation pipelines, and root-cause analysis.
• Work with Expert Supply and Operations to qualify, manage, and engage multilingual contributors and vendors, using clear performance and cost metrics.
• Design, build, and optimize scalable program frameworks for text, image, video, and audio; translate technical requirements into operational workflows and coordinate with Sales, Engineering, Research, Product, and Production.
• Architect mitigations for AI-specific operational risks, including dataset contamination, domain drift, quality decay, and SLA vulnerabilities.
• Use metrics such as throughput, quality, cost per task, and utilization to run delivery operations.

Benefits

• Competitive salary, equity, and benefits package.
• Opportunity to work with cutting-edge AI technology in a rapidly growing industry.
• Dynamic and collaborative work environment.
• Significant opportunities for professional growth and development.
• Opportunity to make an impact on global communication and business.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director