Program Manager - Research Operations
Own and scale Outset’s participant recruitment operation across partners, internal processes, and product experiences. The role requires 5–10 years of recruitment or research operations experience, strong vendor management, and the ability to build cross-functional systems and enablement.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Own partner performance and communication, assessing and optimizing partner quality, reliability, and best-fit use cases.
- Negotiate preferred rates and commercial terms, and build feasibility processes covering incidence rates, targeting, and vendor selection.
- Design and document the end-to-end participant recruitment process, including intake, delivery, fill-time benchmarks, tracking, and escalation playbooks.
- Develop internal enablement and training for the go-to-market team.
- Partner with Product and Engineering on recruitment features such as fraud detection, identity verification, quality flagging, and refunds.
- Identify and specify internal tooling to reduce manual operations work.
- Create best-practice guidance for Account Directors and Account Executives, as well as customer-facing recruitment explanations.
Requirements
- 5–10 years of experience in research operations, participant recruitment, or panel/vendor management.
- Deep expertise in digital qualitative recruitment; quantitative recruitment experience is a plus.
- Hands-on knowledge of panels, marketplaces, screeners, incidence, feasibility, soft launches, quotas, incentives, fraud, and quality control.
- Experience selecting, negotiating with, managing spend for, and holding vendors and partners accountable.
- Strong program management and cross-functional execution skills.
- Experience in both a large organization and a startup.
- Strong communication skills, including training, documentation, playbooks, and customer-facing content.
- Comfortable using AI tooling for content and automation.
- Highly independent and able to define priorities.
Nice to have
- Experience building AI tooling or dashboards.
- Experience at a research platform, panel provider, or research agency.
Compensation
- Annual salary: $150,000–$200,000.
Skills
Participant Recruitment, Research Operations, Vendor Management, Panel Management, Marketplaces, Screeners, Feasibility Analysis, Quotas, Fraud Detection, Quality Control, Program Management, AI Tools, Dashboarding, Cross-Functional Collaboration
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