Product and Research Operations Manager

About the role

The Product and Research Operations Manager will design, scale, and operate Cartesia's global scaled evaluation workforce. This role sits at the intersection of product operations, data operations, and vendor management, and directly impacts model quality and customer outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement workforce structure across languages, skill tiers, and use cases, including evaluators, auditors, and leads for TTS products
• Build capacity models to support continuous eval pipelines and data production workflows
• Own relationships with vendors such as data annotation firms and contractor platforms, negotiating rate cards, SLAs, and throughput guarantees
• Decide on build, buy, or hybrid workforce models and continuously benchmark cost and performance across regions
• Define and track inter-rater reliability, error rates by category, and annotator-level performance distributions
• Build multi-layer QA systems spanning self-checks, peer review, audits, and gold tasks
• Design and run day-to-day operations including task allocation, throughput tracking, and SLA adherence
• Build systems to reduce evaluator fatigue, rotate task types, and maintain consistency across large-scale evaluations
• Partner with tooling teams to improve evaluator UX and with data teams to ensure clean, structured outputs for model training

Requirements

5+ years in operations, workforce management, or data annotation systems

Experience managing large contractor or vendor-based workforces

Proven ability to scale operations from zero to production

Systems thinking with the ability to design scalable operational frameworks

Strong analytical skills with comfort around metrics like inter-rater reliability, precision, and throughput

Ability to execute quickly under ambiguity with close attention to quality and edge cases

Qualifications

Nice to have:

• Experience in AI/ML data operations or evaluation pipelines
• Background in audio, speech, or language-related workflows
• Familiarity with QA systems and annotation tooling
• Experience with marketplace platforms such as Upwork or Mercor
• Exposure to multilingual operations

Skills

None specifically listed, but strong systems thinking and operational management skills are required.

Benefits

Competitive base salary alongside attractive equity package

Fully covered medical insurance along with dental and vision for you and your family

9 weeks paternity & 12 weeks maternity leave

401(k)

Monthly stipend to help you get to and from the office

Flexible PTO

Lunch, dinner and plenty of snacks, provided daily