Senior Program Manager, Data Operations

What You’ll Own

• Design, launch, and own end-to-end data workflows: from raw audio ingestion to production-ready datasets
• Build and evolve labeling specs, style guides, and instructional documentation for global annotation teams
• Identify opportunities for better tooling, automation, and workflow optimization, and lead their implementation
• Translate product goals and model requirements into data creation strategies, deciding what to build, how to build it, and why it matters for product impact
• Own the full lifecycle for your domains — customer expectations, data acquisition, preparation, scaling, provenance, and evaluation — and be accountable for the model outcome, not just the data hand-off
• Prototype and deploy data tools and infrastructure
• Collaborate with Research and Engineering to align data collection with model training architecture and downstream product impact
• Track advancements in speech AI research and evolving market use cases to inform labeling approaches and data design priorities
• Partner with QA and Evaluation leads to deliver high-quality, human-in-the-loop datasets and benchmarks
• Manage and mentor data vendors, freelancers, and potentially internal ICs as the team grows
• Track throughput, data quality, and vendor performance
• Drive continuous improvement in speed, cost-efficiency, and quality across all data operations
• Curate and refine datasets to align with specific product goals, linguistic coverage, or research hypotheses

What We're Looking For

• Experience owning data, ML, or operations programs end-to-end in program/project or product management
• Fluency working directly with technical teams; you can hold a conversation about data quality, evaluation, and model impact
• Systems thinking, understanding how decisions propagate across a system, reason up from fundamentals instead of defaulting to convention, and design solutions that hold up as things scale
• A track record of prioritization under constraint — deciding what to fund, what to cut, and how to sequence it
• Strong operating instincts: you scope, sequence, assign, and ship, and nothing stalls because someone didn't know the next step
• Demonstrated ability to design and build scalable processes, not just manage existing ones

Nice-to-Haves

• Direct exposure to speech/audio, ASR, or TTS data, and the specific nuances of multilingual, code-switched, low-resource, or domain-specific data
• Experience with active-learning or data-selection approaches
• Startup or high-ambiguity experience