Lead, Data Quality - PartnershipsNew

Responsibilities

• Own the full external vendor portfolio for Data Quality: sourcing, evaluation, onboarding, and offboarding of data labeling and review partners.
• Negotiate commercial terms, statements of work, and contracts, and manage pricing, budgets, and surge capacity across vendors.
• Set and enforce SLAs and acceptance criteria; hold every vendor to the same golden set and audit bar as the in-house team.
• Serve as the senior owner when a project rotates to external support, directing the Project Coordinators running that work.
• Build and run the vendor scorecard: throughput, quality, inter-annotator agreement, and SLA adherence, reviewed in regular business reviews.
• Stand up calibration exercises and golden set checks with each vendor so external output matches internal standards.
• Partner with engineering and ML stakeholders to translate data quality requirements into vendor-ready guidelines and specs.
• Plan capacity and ramp with vendors to meet project timelines, including surge needs and new regions.
• Cook up coordination with internal Project Coordinators and leadership on which projects rotate to which vendors and when.

Requirements

• 6+ years in data quality, data labeling operations, vendor or partner management, or ML data operations, with end-to-end ownership of vendor relationships or major workstreams.
• Direct experience selecting, contracting, and managing external data vendors, including defining and enforcing SLAs.
• Track record negotiating commercial terms (pricing, SOWs, capacity) and running vendor business reviews.
• Experience setting quality standards, acceptance criteria, and audit or calibration processes that external teams executed against.
• Comfort working with engineering and ML stakeholders to translate technical requirements into operational guidance.
• Leadership across people you both do and do not directly manage, including coordinators running work on your vendors.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience scaling a multi-vendor or multi-region labeling operation.
• Experience with golden set / ground truth construction.
• Background in robotics, autonomous systems, LLM, or physical AI data.
• Experience standing up new vendor operations in international or lower-cost markets.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is between $100,000 and $160,000 annually. The pay offered for this position may vary based on several individual factors, including job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package may also include additional components/benefits depending on the specific role. This information will be shared if an employment offer is extended.