Technical Program Manager

Crane Venture Partners; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary & equity

London office culture

25 days leave + holidays

Learning & development budget

UK & Europe travel

Company lunches

Monthly socials & bi-annual offsites

Job summary

Encord is seeking a Technical Program Manager in London to lead high-stakes human data projects end to end, spanning medical imaging and robotics data workflows. You will translate ML requirements into clear annotation standards and workflows, train annotators, and own delivery timelines with measurable quality metrics.

This hands-on role requires deep process ownership, cross-functional communication, and the ability to balance throughput with quality while coordinating across time zones and

Qualifications

• 3–7 years of professional experience in AI data or annotation operations, strategy consulting, or data/operations roles at leading tech companies.
• End-to-end ownership of complex, multi-stakeholder workflows with outcomes, not just coordination.
• Working proficiency in Python or SQL.
• Experience managing, coaching or performance-managing a distributed workforce.
• Track record of holding quality and throughput simultaneously with measurable results.
• Ability to translate a detailed technical spec into actionable instructions.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery of projects end to end — throughput, quality and timeline.
• Translate ML requirements into clear annotation workflows and data needs.
• Be the deepest expert on annotation standards and resolve ambiguity and edge cases.
• Maintain quality through process refinement and structured feedback.
• Train annotators and scale the team, coordinating with Learning & Development.
• Coach annotation teams with context and develop their skills as work gets harder.
• Measure annotator performance and decide on retraining or continuation.
• Allocate tasks and manage queues to meet throughput and quality targets.
• Instrument the project at launch with measurable criteria so first batch ships on time.
• Produce delivery reporting for customers and surface risks early.
• Partner with Product and Engineering on process/tooling improvements and feed back into playbooks.

Skills

Detail-oriented

Execution-focused

Analytical mindset

Python/SQL proficiency

Distributed workforce leadership

Cross-functional communication

Problem solving under load

Stakeholder management

AI interest

Job description

About us

Encord is the universal data layer for AI that helps 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. Our platform indexes, curates, annotates, and evaluates data across the full AI lifecycle, from development through production.

Trusted by Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, Zipline, and more. We're an ambitious team of 100+ working at the frontier of AI and have raised $60M in Series C funding from Wellington Management, CRV, Next47 and Y Combinator.

The role

We're hiring Technical Program Managers in London to run Encord's highest-stakes human data projects end to end — the work for frontier AI labs and physical AI companies, in specialist domains such as medical imaging and robotics, and the data types we are running for the first time. These are the projects where the technical complexity is highest and where a mistake is expensive.

You will work at the point where machine learning requirements become annotation work: translating what a research team actually needs into workflows, standards and instructions that a specialist workforce can execute at volume, then holding the result to a measurable standard.

This is the load-bearing role in the business, and it is a hands-on one. You will know your projects' annotation standards better than anyone at the company, teach them to the annotators producing the work, decide who works on what, judge who is performing and who should come off, resolve the edge cases nobody anticipated, and answer for the delivery timeline. You will run several projects at once, and you will own how they are run.

What you'll do

• Own delivery of your projects end to end — throughput, quality and timeline

• Translate complex machine learning requirements into clear annotation workflows, and design the process that produces the data the model actually needs

• Become the deepest expert at Encord on your project's annotation standards, and the person who resolves ambiguity and edge cases as they surface

• Maintain quality through process refinement, auditing and structured feedback loops, rather than through inspection at the end

• Train annotators onto the project and keep them improving — building the material yourself until our Learning & Development Specialist is in place

• Coach your annotation teams: give them the context behind the task, not only the rules, and develop their skills as the work gets harder

• Measure annotator performance and make the calls it implies: who continues, who needs retraining, who comes off the project

• Allocate tasks and manage the queue so that throughput and quality targets are met together rather than traded against each other

• Instrument the project at launch with the Quality Systems Lead — acceptance criteria, sampling plan, reviewer ratio — so it is measurable before the first batch ships

• Produce the delivery reporting for customers, and surface risk early enough that something can still be done about it

• Partner with Product and Engineering on process and tooling improvements, and feed recurring problems back into the playbooks, into training and into the platform

Who we're looking for

• You go deep on the detail. Your instinct is to read the whole specification and annotate fifty items yourself before you assign anyone else

• Execution-oriented: you are measured by what shipped, not by what was planned, and you would rather fix a workflow than document one

• Analytically rigorous. You work in numbers — throughput, quality rate, utilisation — and you notice when one is being bought at the expense of another

• Technically fluent enough to work with ML teams on what they need and why, and to pull your own data rather than wait for it

• You make people calls on evidence rather than on impression, and you can have the difficult version of that conversation

• Organised under real load: several projects, several time zones, and requirements that move

• A clear writer and a strong cross-functional communicator. Most of the workforce delivering your project you will never meet in person

• Entrepreneurial: when a date is at risk your first move is to re-plan, not to escape, and you invent the process where none exists

• Genuinely interested in AI and in what the data you are producing is actually for

Experience requirements

• 3–7 years of professional experience, ideally combining operational delivery with analytical work — AI data or annotation operations, strategy consulting, or data and operations roles at leading technology companies

• Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of complex, multi-stakeholder workflows, with responsibility for the outcome rather than the coordination

• Working proficiency in Python or SQL

• Direct experience managing, coaching or performance-managing a distributed workforce

• Track record of holding quality and throughput at the same time, with the numbers to show it

• Experience translating a detailed technical specification into instructions other people can follow

• Bonus: direct experience of annotation, evaluation or model-training workflows

Why Encord

• Competitive salary, commission, and equity in a high-growth startup

• Strong in-person culture — most of the team works from our London office 4+ days/week

• 25 days annual leave + UK public holidays

• Annual learning & development budget

• Travel for customer visits, events, and conferences across the UK and Europe

• Company lunches twice a week

• Monthly socials & bi-annual team offsites