Program Manager - Research Operations

Adverb; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Outset is redefining research with AI-powered user interviews, serving global brands and enterprise customers. The role owns end-to-end recruitment systems, partner networks, and internal enablement, shaping how we scale with quality and efficiency.

You will partner with product and engineering to embed recruitment tooling, ensure fraud controls, and create clear playbooks for cross-functional teams. A strong background in research operations and vendor management is essential, with startup

Qualifications

• 5–10 years in research operations, participant recruitment, or panel/vendor management.
• Deep expertise in digital qualitative recruitment; quantitative recruitment a plus.
• Experience managing vendors/partners and directing spend.
• Strong program management to organize cross-functional efforts.
• Experience in both large orgs and startups is valued.
• Excellent communication, able to translate complex info into training and content.
• Comfort with AI tooling for content/automation; AI tooling dashboards a plus.
• Highly independent with strong prioritization and execution.
• Bonus: experience at a research platform, panel provider, or research agency.

Responsibilities

• Own partner performance and negotiation, optimize each partner's quality and fit.
• Build feasibility process, incidence rates, targeting, and vendor allocation as volume grows.
• Design end-to-end recruitment processes with benchmarks and playbooks.
• Create internal enablement and GTM training for recruitment processes.
• Collaborate with Product/Engineering on fraud detection, identity verification, and quality flags.
• Identify and specify internal tooling to reduce manual ops.
• Translate recruitment operations into training and customer-facing content.

Skills

Research operations

Vendor management

Program management

Cross-functional

AI tooling

Independent

Startup experience

Job description

Outset invented a better way to do research: AI-powered user interviews.

Global brands like Hubspot, Microsoft, Uber and Nestle use Outset to achieve deeper, qualitative insights about their users at unprecedented speed and scale.

The research industry is massive (>$140B and growing) and ripe for disruption. Incumbents are outdated, slow, and burdened by high-cost services. That's our opportunity.

Outset is backed by top Silicon Valley investors and raised a $30M Series B in December 2025—less than six months after our Series A—led by Radical Ventures with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), 8VC, Y Combinator, and Adverb Ventures.

The raise follows a breakout year, with our business growing 8x as enterprise customers across industries adopt our category, AI‑moderated research, as the new standard for understanding people.

We’re a tight-knit team serving some of the world’s largest enterprises.

Participant recruitment at Outset spans a global partner network, internal process, and the product experience itself — and this role owns all three. Rather than running recruitment study by study, you'll build the system that makes it predictable at scale. You'll be Outset's authority on recruitment: the connective tissue between our partners, our teams, and our product.

Responsibilities

• Own partner performance and communication, with a system to assess and continually optimize each partner's quality, reliability, and best-fit use cases.

• Negotiate preferred rates and commercial terms, and build the feasibility process (incidence rates, targeting, which vendor for which use case) that keeps recruitment predictable as volume grows.

• Design and document the end-to-end recruitment process, from intake through delivery — with fill-time benchmarks by audience/screening criteria and a clear playbook for tracking and escalating at-risk projects.

• Build the internal enablement and training that gets the GTM team up to speed and confident in how recruitment works.

• Partner with Product and Engineering on the recruitment experience — fraud detection, identity verification, quality flagging, refunds — bringing structured, evidence-backed problems into the product roadmap.

• Identify and spec internal tooling that reduces manual ops work.

• Translate how recruitment works into content for two audiences: best-practice guidance for Account Directors/AEs, and customer-facing explanations of our role, our partners' role, and what to expect.

Qualifications

• 5–10 years in research operations, participant recruitment, or panel/vendor management, with deep expertise in digital qualitative recruitment; experience with quantitative recruitment is a plus

• Hands-on understanding of how participant recruitment actually works: panels and marketplaces, screeners, incidence and feasibility, soft launches, quotas, incentives, fraud, and quality control.

• Track record managing vendors and partners — selecting, negotiating, holding accountable, managing spend.

• Genuine program management ability — you can hold a messy, cross-functional problem in your head, sequence it, and drive it to a working system.

• Experience at both a large organization and a startup. We want the enterprise process instincts and the scrappiness to build fast without waiting for permission.

• Strong communicator — able to distill complex, cross-functional information into clear training, documentation, playbooks, and customer-facing content.

• Comfortable with AI tooling for content and automation; experience building AI tooling/dashboards a plus.

• Highly independent — this role is built for someone who defines priorities as much as executes them.

• Bonus: experience at a research platform, panel provider, or research agency.