Strategic AI Lead

Snorkel AI • New York City, NY

12h

About The Position

At Snorkel, we believe that meaningful AI begins with data, not just the model. The company's mission is to help enterprises transform expert knowledge into specialized AI at scale. Snorkel originated as a research project at the Stanford AI Lab in 2015 and has adapted to the evolving AI landscape, including generative AI breakthroughs. The core principle remains that data is crucial for achieving differentiation, high performance, and production-ready AI systems. Snorkel collaborates with large organizations to empower various professionals, from scientists to journalists, to build custom AI faster using their data. The Strategic AI Lead (SAIL) role is responsible for managing Snorkel's highest-stakes Data-as-a-Service programs from end-to-end. This position operates like a CEO within the program, owning its success, delivering high-quality outputs on time, and managing revenue and margin. The SAIL is accountable for strategy and execution to maintain and elevate quality standards, serving as the single point of accountability for program delivery and customer impact. The role combines applied AI rigor, deep domain expertise, and operational craft for executing complex programs at scale. The SAIL translates technical requirements into executable programs, designs tasks for signal production, and manages multi-million-dollar programs with thousands of expert contributors. This operator drives excellence through team coordination, monitors KPIs, and manages internal and external communications. Strategic AI Leads connect clients, Snorkel's Forward Deployed Engineers, Delivery Operations, Researchers, and the Expert Contributor Network, focusing on outcomes rather than activities. The role involves navigating ambiguity and shifting requirements, requiring a founder's instinct, a consultant's rigor, and an operator's bias for action.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent hands-on experience
• 5+ years in a role where you owned outcomes end-to-end: technical program/project management, founding/early-stage operator, management consulting, or technical product management
• A proven track record of building something from scratch in a resource-constrained, fast-changing environment, and adapting as the ground shifts
• Analytical by default, with hands-on comfort with SQL, JSON and Python when you need to dig into data yourself.
• ML intuition to reason about training data quality, evaluation design, and reward shaping for RL environments - and to engage as a peer with researchers at frontier labs.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication; comfort operating with C-level sponsors and individual contributors in the same day
• A genuine tolerance for ambiguity and a strong bias toward action

Nice To Haves

• Top-tier management consulting or MBA background with a record of turning broad strategic goals into measurable outcomes
• You've been a founder, early-stage operator, or first hire into a function, and you want that kind of ownership again
• Experience running data labeling, SFT, RLHF, or RL environment, especially for frontier labs
• Experience building or managing distributed networks of subject-matter experts or expert contributors (dozens to hundreds/thousands of contributors)
• Exposure to reward design, model evaluation, or post-training pipelines for LLMs
• Experience running commercial or revenue-owning programs at a startup or high-growth organization
• Proficiency with data visualization tools (e.g., Tableau, Power BI, Looker) to instrument projects and communicate insights to diverse audiences
• Fluent in Agile methodologies and tools like Jira and Confluence

Responsibilities

• Own the program like a CEO. Own the P&L for your pipeline: accountable for quality, timelines, revenue, margin, and budget. Forecast accurately, surface risks early, and manage spend against plan.
• Be the single-threaded owner across stakeholders. Your program touches client research and engineering teams, Snorkel's own forward deployed engineers, researchers, and growth partners, and the Expert Contributor Network supporting data production. You are the single person who keeps all of that aligned, accountable, and informed.
• Design the training data program. Translate what the model needs to learn into task definitions, quality rubrics, evaluation criteria, and RL environments. Decide what "great" looks like before expert contributors start producing it.
• Develop and scale the Expert Contributor Network. Define the contributor profile your program needs, work with cross-functional partners to recruit them, and design the training and QA systems that ramp them quickly. Maintain quality standards as volume grows from hundreds to thousands of contributors.
• Build the system from scratch. Translate vague, evolving client requirements into crisp workstreams, success criteria, and milestones. Stand up the workflows, quality systems, and operating rhythms where none exist, then harden and automate them as pipeline scales.
• Monitor, measure, and mitigate. Instrument each program with the right dashboards, KPIs, and a live risk register. Catch regressions and surface risks before clients do. Use data, not intuition, to drive decisions, forecasts, escalations, and mitigations.
• Drive internal and external comms. Set the narrative. Keep Snorkel leadership, client executive sponsors, and the working team aligned through clear, written-first updates that surface progress, risks, and asks without filler.
• Manage the data flows under the hood. Oversee data ingestion, transformation, and storage across multiple systems, leveraging SQL, JSON, Python, and query management to pull, push, and consolidate data from wherever it lives.
• Operate with urgency. Move fast, hold the quality bar, and bias toward shipping. Our clients are racing to ship better models, and our pace has to match, without ever dropping the standard that sets Snorkel apart.

Benefits

• medical
• dental
• vision
• 401(k)
• meaningful opportunities to shape priorities and initiatives
• influence key strategic decisions
• directly impact our ongoing success
• fully supported in building your career in an environment designed for growth, learning, and shared success
• reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Number of Employees: 251-500 employees