Strategic Project Lead, DataFactory

JOB TITLE: Strategic Project Lead, Data Factory

LOCATION: Santa Clara, CA/remote

DURATION: 6 months

RATE RANGE: $60-$100/hr

Our client is a global leader in AI and high-performance computing, powering innovations in gaming, robotics, and data science.

We are seeking a seasoned, techno-functional leader to drive the development and execution of large-scale LLM training programs. This role is deeply technical and customer-facing, with significant emphasis on dataset creation, annotation and workflows, and high-quality data pipelines for foundational model training. The ideal candidate combines deep technical understanding of the LLM training lifecycle, strong operational rigor, and exceptional cross-functional leadership.

This candidate should also be comfortable operating with little structure, handling sensitive information responsibly, and navigating complex organizational dynamics with humility and confidence.

• Lead the generation and delivery of high-quality, scalable LLM training datasets with a focus on SFT, RLHF, rubric-based evaluation, reasoning, and agentic workflows.
• Oversee the end-to-end data lifecycle from customer intake to delivery, including collaboration with the researchers for defining the data requirements, guidelines, designing the data annotation steps/workflow, quality metrics, review workflows, and delivery setup.
• Serve as the primary contact for large engagements; manage stakeholder expectations, requirements gathering, and delivery timelines.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, research, and delivery teams to ensure technical feasibility and alignment across work streams.
• Develop, document, and refine best practices for prompt evaluation, data schema design, evaluation metrics (e.g., win rate, pairwise preference), and human-in-the-loop QA.
• Manage and mentor leads, program managers, and annotators working across multiple AI training pods.
• Operate as a strategic business partner to our customers; provide insight on tradeoffs, resourcing, and performance metrics.
• Build internal capability by harvesting reusable assets and contribute in continued improvements across data quality, tools and processes.

• 10+ years of experience building and leading large scale technical delivery teams. Proven ability to lead large cross functional teams (100+) by building strong operations
• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science or equivalent practical experience leading large-scale technical initiatives.
• Demonstrated experience managing large-scale dataset generation or annotation for LLMs, ideally with experience in RLHF or SFT pipelines.
• Strong understanding of quality review mechanisms including prompt win rate, agreement metrics, inter-annotator consistency, and preference modeling.
• Experience with human data generation across at least one of the modalities (Text, Image, Video, Audio)
• Technical fluency in data platforms, machine learning concepts and modern Machine Learning tooling (e.g., Hugging Face, Lang Chain, Weights & Biases).
• Strong communication skills with experience presenting to executive stakeholders, managing client escalations, and aligning delivery with strategic goals.

• Prior experience at AI Data Platform companies
• Past experience with retrieval augmented generation (RAG), fine-tuning, and human evaluation workflows.
• Familiarity with fine-tuning LLMs, prompt engineering at scale, and instruction dataset design.
• Technical fluency in Python and cloud infrastructure
• Familiarity with bench marks (SWE Bench, MMMLU, or equivalent)

Individual compensation is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base hourly rate or annual salary only, unless otherwise stated. In addition to base compensation, full-time roles are eligible for Medical, Dental, Vision, Commuter and 401K benefits with company matching.