Head of Technical Program Management, Applied AI

LILT AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

LILT seeks a Head of Technical Program Management for Applied AI to own and optimize delivery across its AI lab engagements. You will lead TPMs and engineers, drive capacity planning, and partner with researchers to ensure top-tier quality and on-time delivery for multilingual, multimodal projects.

You will balance high-stakes operational ownership with coaching, shaping scalable workflows, dashboards, and frameworks while maintaining strong executive partnerships and customer outcomes.

Qualifications

• Accountable for delivering large-scale, mission-critical technical portfolios and ensuring SLA adherence.
• Experience leading multi-team delivery organizations and managing customer-facing programs.
• Proven ability to build program functions, processes, and systems from scratch and mentor talent.
• Deep understanding of modern AI landscape, LLMs, multimodal models, training/inference pipelines, and dataset diversity.
• Strong data fluency with SQL, spreadsheets, and BI tools to drive metrics.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery for all Applied AI programs, including timelines, quality SLAs, margins, and customer satisfaction.
• Recruit, mentor, and scale TPMs and project managers to run complex programs independently.
• Oversee capacity planning, staffing, and resource allocation to balance demand with speed and margins.
• Build standardized delivery systems, playbooks, dashboards, and processes for consistent outcomes.
• Partner with research to standardize quality control and manage executive relationships with key labs and customers.

Skills

Executive Stakeholder Management

Delivery Leadership

People Management

Frontier AI Expertise

Data Fluency

Builder & Coach Mindset

0-to-1 & Scale Experience

Education

B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, AI, or related technical field (12+ yrs) or Ph.D. (8+ yrs)

Job description

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, Canva, the United States Department of Defense, the United States Air Force, 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).

Preferred Skills

• Experience at an AI data, human data, or language services company, or delivering for frontier AI labs.
• Experience leading globally distributed teams across time zones.
• Familiarity with Python and modern program tooling (e.g., Linear, Jira, custom analytics) to automate reporting and workflows.
• Fluency in multiple human languages.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary, equity, and benefits package.
• Opportunity to work with cutting-edge AI technology in a rapidly growing industry.
• A dynamic and collaborative work environment.
• Significant opportunities for professional growth and development.
• The chance to make a real impact on global communication and business.

Our Story

Our founders, Spence and John met at Google working on Google Translate. As researchers at Stanford and Berkeley, they both worked on language technology to make information accessible to everyone. While together at Google, they were amazed to learn that Google Translate wasn’t used for enterprise products and services inside the company.The quality just wasn’t there. So they set out to build something better. LILT was born.

LILT has been a machine learning company since its founding in 2015. At the time, machine translation didn’t meet the quality standard for enterprise translations, so LILT assembled a cutting‑edge research team tasked with closing that gap. While meeting customer demand for translation services, LILT has prioritized investments in Large Language Models, human‑in‑the‑loop systems, and now agentic AI.

With AI innovation accelerating and enterprise demand growing, the next phase of LILT’s journey is just beginning.

What Sets Our Platform Apart

• Brand‑aware AI that learns your voice, tone, and terminology to ensure every translation is accurate and consistent
• Agentic AI workflows that automate the entire translation process from content ingestion to quality review to publishing
• 100+ native integrations with systems like Adobe Experience Manager, Webflow, Salesforce, GitHub, and Google Drive to simplify content translation
• Human‑in‑the‑loop reviews via our global network of professional linguists, for high‑impact content that requires expert review

LILT in the News

• Featured in The Software Report’s Top 100 Software Companies!
• LILT makes it onto the Inc. 5000 List.
• LILT’s continues to be an intellectual powerhouse, holding numerous patents that help power the most efficient and sophisticated AI and language models in the industry.
• Check out all our news on our website.

Information collected and processed as part of your application process, including any job applications you choose to submit, is subject to LILT's Privacy Policy at https://lilt.com/legal/privacy.

At LILT, we are committed to a fair, inclusive, and transparent hiring process. As part of our recruitment efforts, we may use artificial intelligence (AI) and automated tools to assist in the evaluation of applications, including résumé screening, assessment scoring, and interview analysis. These tools are designed to support human decision‑making and help us identify qualified candidates efficiently and objectively. All final hiring decisions are made by people. If you have any concerns, require accommodations, or would like to opt‑out of the use of AI in our hiring process, please let us know at [e-mail].

LILT is an equal opportunity employer. We extend equal opportunity to all individuals without regard to an individual’s race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic characteristics, veteran or marital status, pregnancy, or any other classification protected by applicable local, state or federal laws. We are committed to the principles of fair employment and the elimination of all discriminatory practices.