Program Manager - Research Operations

About the role

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
• 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

Pay

Compensation Range: $150K – $200K