Head of Technical Program Management, Applied AI
Lilt Corporate · United States · remote
USD 191,000 to 250,000 per year
ABOUT LILT
AI is changing how the world communicates — and LILT is leading that transformation.
We're on a mission to make the world's information accessible to everyone, regardless of the language they speak. We use cutting-edge AI, machine translation, and human-in-the-loop expertise to translate content faster, more accurately, and more cost-effectively without compromising on brand, voice, or quality.
At LILT, we empower our teammates with leading tools, global collaboration, and growth opportunities to do their best work. Our company virtues—Work together, win together; Find a way or make one; Dance in the customer's shoes; Quicker than they expect; Quality is Job 1—guide everything we do. We are trusted by Intel Corporation https://www.linkedin.com/company/intel-corporation/, Canva https://www.linkedin.com/company/canva/, the United States Department of Defense https://www.linkedin.com/company/deptofdefense/, the United States Air Force https://www.linkedin.com/company/united-states-air-force/, ASICS https://www.linkedin.com/company/asics/, and hundreds of global Enterprises. Backed by Sequoia, Intel Capital, and Redpoint, we’re building a category-defining company in a $50B+ global translation market being redefined by AI.
ABOUT THE ROLE
As Head of Technical Program Management for Applied AI, you will drive and own all project execution, customer outcomes, and delivery excellence across LILT’s Applied AI practice
for the world's leading AI labs. Serving as builder and coach, you will lead the people, operations, and systems behind every Applied AI engagement — multilingual and multimodal training data, evaluations, and benchmark programs — and make sure each one ships on time, on budget, and to the highest quality bar. You are responsible for constructing LILT’s technical program management capabilities from the ground up while actively developing, mentoring, and elevating a high-performing team. Operating at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and industrial-scale execution, you hold total accountability for every customer engagement —ensuring every deliverable across your entire team meets the highest standards of precision, speed, and technical rigour.
This is an operator's role: you will balance high-stakes operational ownership with a builder and coach mindset. You will manage and run a high-volume, high-velocity delivery organization: Technical Program Managers, project managers, and the expert and vendor workforces behind them. You bring equal passion to building the operational systems and cadence, capacity models, quality systems, and execution frameworks that power our AI lab deliverables, and coaching your team to operate as high-agency "CEOs" of their respective customer portfolios, , all while staying close enough to the work to step into a critical program or a customer escalation when it matters. You are technically fluent enough to partner with researchers and engineers, but your edge is turning complex, ambiguous customer requirements into reliable, repeatable delivery. While you empower your team to drive day-to-day execution, the buck stops with you for overall portfolio health, customer retention, program SLAs, and delivery outcomes.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- End-to-end Practice Ownership: Serve as the single point of accountability for customer outcomes across all Applied AI programs — technical delivery, project work and timelines, quality SLAs, margin, and customer satisfaction. You own top-line program success metrics, quality SLAs, delivery timelines, and customer satisfaction across all Applied AI projects.
- Lead and scale the delivery team: Recruit, mentor, and scale a world-class team of TPMs and project managers. Set clear goals, coach for ownership, unblock across complex technical and operational challenges, and build a team that runs complex programs independently.
- Run delivery operations and capacity planning at volume: Own capacity planning, staffing, and resource allocation across programs. Turn shifting customer demand into reliable production plans and delivery forecasts that protect speed and margin.
- Build the delivery operating system: Standardize intake, scoping, kickoff, quality control, reporting, and close-out. Turn individual program learnings into repeatable playbooks, systems, processes, and dashboards.
- Strategic Customer Partnership & Escalations: Act as executive partner and delivery sponsor for key frontier AI lab relationships. Proactively co-develop benchmark transcreations with customer research leads. Lead escalations, run business reviews, and help shape scope, pricing, and timelines with Sales.
- Own quality: Partner with Research to standardize quality control across delivery, including embedded calibration, gold sets, inter-annotator agreement, LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, model eval pipelines and root-cause analysis into every customer program, ensuring that quality issues are proactively controlled and mitigated.
- Manage the expert and vendor workforce: Work with Expert Supply and Operations to qualify, manage, and engage multilingual contributors and vendors, with clear performance and cost metrics.
- Cross-functional Workflow Design and Execution: Design, build, and optimize scalable program frameworks for text, image, video, and audio modalities. Turn complex technical requirements into seamless operational realities, bridging Sales, Engineering, Research, Product, Production, and Engineering to scope and build project workflows that are designed optimally, launched quickly, and executed smoothly
QUALIFICATIONS
- Accountable Mindset & Ownership: Proven track record as the final owner of large-scale, mission-critical technical portfolios, with direct accountability for project delivery, customer outcomes, and SLA adherence. Demonstrated experience architecting mitigations for AI-specific operational risks (e.g., dataset contamination, domain drift, quality decay, and SLA vulnerabilities).
- Experience: 10+ years in delivery, operations, or program leadership, including 5+ years managing managers or multi-team delivery organizations.Proven ownership of a large, customer-facing delivery portfolio with accountability for SLAs, quality, and margin.
- Builder & Coach Mindset: Proven track record of building technical program functions, processes, and systems from scratch, coupled with a deep dedication to coaching, mentoring, and growing talent.
- People Management & Leadership: 5+ years of direct people management experience building and scaling TPM, Product, or Engineering teams within high-growth AI or enterprise tech environments.
- Frontier AI Expertise: Deep, hands-on understanding of the modern AI landscape—including LLMs, multimodal models, training/inference pipelines, and complex dataset diversity (multilingual and multi-domain). Hands-on experience delivering AI training data, human data, LLM evaluation, annotation, or localization programs at scale, with distributed contributor or vendor workforces.
- 0-to-1 & Scale Experience: Demonstrated ability to build operating systems in high-velocity startup environments and scale them to support high-throughput, mission-critical operations where quality control is paramount.
- Strong Data Fluency: comfortable using SQL, spreadsheets, or BI tools to run the business on metrics such as throughput, quality, cost per task, and utilization.
- Contemporary Industry Acumen: Working knowledge of the modern AI landscape (LLMs, multimodal models, training and evaluation pipelines) to partner credibly with researchers and engineers.
- Executive Stakeholder Management: Excellent business acumen, executive presence, and communication style with experience building high-trust partnerships with top-tier AI labs, customers, and enterprise executive teams
- Education: B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, AI, or a related technical field with 12+ years of industry experience (or Ph.D. with 8+ years).