Strategic Project Lead, Software Engineering

Turing • San Francisco, NY

1d

About The Position

This role involves owning the production system for Turing's software-engineering data programs. The Strategic Project Lead will translate complex research requirements into predictable delivery across various metrics like quality, throughput, contributor performance, timelines, and cost. The programs can encompass supervised coding demonstrations, repository-level tasks, agentic trajectories, reinforcement-learning environments, benchmarks, code review, and rubric-based evaluations. This position requires coordinating a large number of distributed software engineers and adapting quickly to evolving research needs. It is an operations leadership role with a significant technical component, requiring the ability to inspect code, understand tests, analyze quality signals, and critically evaluate workflows and rubrics. The primary focus is on building and operating a system that consistently delivers high-quality technical work at scale, rather than acting as the principal engineer for every program.

Requirements

• Background in consulting, finance, startups, or other operationally intense environments.
• Proven track record of managing complex, multi-stakeholder projects.
• Strong analytical and communication abilities: ability to spot bottlenecks, build measurement plans, and communicate fixes clearly.
• Customer-facing experience: comfortable working directly with high-profile clients, managing expectations, and building long-term relationships.
• Excited by gritty process optimization and large-scale execution.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery on every project, designing and managing data pipelines from customer specification to final delivery with accountability for scope, timeline, and quality.
• Diagnose and resolve bottlenecks in real-time by re-sequencing workflows, refining instructions, creating incentive systems, and scaling review processes to meet throughput targets.
• Conduct daily "war room" syncs to proactively address issues before they impact customers.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for researchers and program managers at frontier AI labs, delivering clear reporting and anticipating client needs.
• Build long-term trust with clients, identify expansion opportunities, and convert one-off projects into multi-year partnerships.
• Orchestrate the work of 100–1,000+ contributors, including sourcing, vetting, onboarding, training, and performance management of domain experts across distributed workspaces.
• Maintain high execution standards throughout the production lifecycle, from annotation to review to delivery.
• Design motivation and performance systems, including gamification, to keep large contributor pools engaged and productive.
• Own quality control across the annotation lifecycle, setting standards, measuring performance, and addressing deviations.
• Analyze datasets to identify trends, anomalies, and systematic errors, and implement root cause fixes.
• Implement and continuously improve annotation, evaluation, and curation best practices.
• Innovate processes to make operations faster, better, and cheaper, staying ahead of emerging practices in AI data operations.
• Champion workflow changes that reduce task completion times and improve cost efficiency.
• Maintain clear, scalable documentation for process improvements.
• Codify successful practices by documenting onboarding scripts, quality benchmarks, contributor management frameworks, and escalation patterns.
• Own the domain's section of the SPL knowledge base and mentor new hires.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Flexible working hours
• Amazing work culture (Super collaborative & supportive work environment; 5 days a week)
• Awesome colleagues (Surround yourself with top talent from Meta, Google, LinkedIn etc. as well as people with deep startup experience)

What This Job Offers

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