Special Project Lead

Contra; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical

Dental

Vision

401k Matching

Company Laptop

Job summary

Contra is expanding its research team in San Francisco to lead end-to-end studies on how creatives interact with AI. You will design studies, manage data labeling and evaluation workflows, and translate findings into practical guidance for clients across design, video, and imagery.

You will coordinate with creative experts and engineers to ensure rigorous methodologies, timely delivery, and measurable impact, while building reusable processes and benchmarks for ongoing partnerships.

Qualifications

• Design studies for creative and AI evaluation workflows.
• Experience labeling data and human-in-the-loop systems.
• Ability to translate findings into actionable recommendations.
• Track record managing multiple concurrent projects.

Responsibilities

• The methodology: annotation protocols, rubrics, and evaluation designs for creative and multimodal outputs.
• Delivery: scope, evaluator staffing, quality routing, timelines, and client relationships from kickoff to final readout.
• Quality: data quality, inter-rater reliability, and real-time course correction as needed.
• Analysis and storytelling: qualitative and quantitative findings, reports, and workshops.
• The systems behind it: automate repeated tasks and collaborate with engineering on tooling to speed up work.
• The narrative: case studies and benchmark publications to sharpen Contra Labs' market positioning.

Skills

Study design

Data analysis

Creative evaluation

Project management

Communication

Job description

Who we are

Contra Labs is a human-centered research lab studying how creatives actually use AI, how tools can serve creative work better, and how to protect the originality that gets flattened as everything starts to look the same.

We connect a global network of top creative talent with frontier AI labs and product companies. By grounding our research in real creative workflows, we help define what "good" looks like across design, video, imagery, and beyond. Our work powers benchmarking, evaluation, and post-training for leading models and applications. Built on Contra, the professional network for independent creatives, we turn human judgment into the training and evaluation layer that helps these tools serve the people who use them.

Why this role exists

We are scaling across client engagements: post-training dataset creation, benchmarking programs, and ongoing evaluation partnerships. Each project spans a different mix of AI labs, creative-tool companies, and research teams, with different requirements, timelines, and quality bars. We need someone to own this work from end to end.

Think of yourself as the operator for a project or vertical. You sit between three groups that do not naturally talk to each other: the client who needs the data, the creative experts producing it, and the internal engineering team building the tooling. Your job is to make all three feel like they are working on the same thing, and to ship results that are both rigorous and genuinely useful.

What you'll own

• The methodology. Annotation protocols, rubrics, and evaluation designs for creative and multimodal outputs.
• Delivery. Scope, evaluator staffing, quality routing, timelines, and the client relationship, from kickoff to final readout.
• Quality. Data quality, inter-rater reliability, and real-time course correction when something feels off. You hold the bar, and you hold the levers to fix it.
• Analysis and storytelling. Qualitative and quantitative analysis turned into clear findings, recommendations, reports, and workshops that clients act on.
• The systems behind it. You turn repeated work into clean, measurable process, and you partner with engineering on the tooling that makes that process faster and more reliable.
• The narrative. Case studies and benchmark publications that sharpen how Contra Labs is understood in the market.

About you

• You design studies for a living. You can scope a question, run the study, analyze the data, and translate it into a direction people can act on.
• You understand good creative, and you can explain it. You recognize creative quality and can say why, and you can tell the difference between personal preference and something closer to ground truth. You build frameworks that capture that signal faithfully.
• You care more about people than about technology for its own sake. You understand how humans judge creative work and design systems around that.
• You turn messy work into machines. You make process clear, predictable, and measurable, and you run a tight ship across several projects at once.
• High ownership, low ego, bias to action. You ship a v1, learn, and do what it takes to deliver.

Experience

• 3+ years designing studies, running evaluations, analyzing data, and presenting findings.
• Experience with data labeling, annotation, human-in-the-loop systems, or AI and ML evaluation workflows.
• A track record managing several concurrent projects, including annotation, evaluation, or QA work.
• A real point of view on creative quality and what "good" looks like.

Bonus

• A strong research background, qualitative and quantitative. A Master's or PhD in HCI, cognitive science, psychology, design research, or a related field is a plus, and so is equivalent depth from industry.
• Statistical methods for evaluation work: inter-rater reliability, sampling, regression, significance testing.
• RLHF, LLM evaluation, or benchmark design.
• Ethnography, UX research, or design-study methods.
• Startup or 0-to-1 experience.

Requirements

• Based in San Francisco, California

Total comp

• Salary: $150,000 to $200,000 USD plus equity
• Medical, dental, vision
• 401k matching
• Company laptop on your start date

Interview process

1. Recruiting team (20 minutes)
2. CEO and co-founder (30 minutes)
3. Technical interview, research and methods focus (45 minutes)
4. VP of Product (45 minutes)
5. Paid case study and presentation (60 minutes)

Note: Contra communicates with applicants through contra.com domains only. We never ask candidates for money. For current postings, visit Contra Careers.