Lead Program Manager - Generative AI Data Operations at Welocalize

Welo Data works with technology companies to provide datasets that are high-quality, ethically sourced, relevant, diverse, and scalable to supercharge their AI models. As a Welocalize brand, WeloData leverages over 25 years of experience in partnering with the world’s most innovative companies and brings together a curated global community of over 500,000 AI training and domain experts to offer services that span: ANNOTATION & LABELLING: Transcription, summarization, image and video classification and labeling. ENHANCING LLMs: Prompt engineering, SFT, RLHF, red teaming and adversarial model training, model output ranking. DATA COLLECTION & GENERATION: From institutional languages to remote field audio collection. RELEVANCE & INTENT: Culturally nuanced and aware, ranking, relevance, and evaluation to train models for search, ads, and LLM output. Want to join our Welo Data team? We bring practical, applied AI expertise to projects. We have both strong academic experience and a deep working knowledge of state-of-the-art AI tools, frameworks, and best practices. Help us elevate our clients' Data at Welo Data. Role Purpose  Leads a program of AI training data projects at scale. Owns program-level strategy and delivery, manages a cross-functional team, and is the primary owner of the client relationship for the program. Partners closely with the Lead Quality Manager to keep quality consistent and drive continuous improvement across high-volume operations.  Key Responsibilities • Program strategy & planning: Define program goals, roadmap, milestones, and operating model across multiple projects and vendors. • Team management: Lead a delivery team (PMs, Coordinators) with clear goals, capacity plans, coaching, and performance feedback. • Client ownership: Act as the day-to-day executive contact; run governance, planning, and QBR-style reviews; align scope, priorities, and change. • Quality partnership: Co-own quality outcomes with the Manager of Quality; align on guidelines, audits, acceptance criteria, and corrective actions. • Scale & throughput: Plan and secure rater/annotator capacity; optimize shifts, handoffs, automation, and tooling to meet high-volume targets. • Financial stewardship: Build and manage budgets, margins, and change orders; ensure commercial and delivery commitments stay aligned. • Risk, issue & change control: Maintain program RAID; lead root-cause analyses and remediation; escalate high-impact items with options and impact. • Process improvement & automation: Standardize SOPs, templates, and dashboards; pilot and scale automation with Ops Tech. • Compliance & security: Ensure policy adherence for data handling, privacy, and platform access across the program. • Stakeholder management: Coordinate with Sales/Account, Quality, Operations, and Vendor Management to meet client and business goals. Skills • Program planning and portfolio governance across multiple projects. • Team leadership: goal setting, coaching, delegation, and performance feedback. • Strong communication with senior client stakeholders and internal leaders. • Solid use of spreadsheets, PM/task boards, and BI dashboards; familiarity with SQL/ETL concepts is a plus. • Quality mindset with practical use of SOPs, QA gates, and acceptance criteria. • Sound judgment on scope, time, cost, and quality; confident negotiation and escalation. • Comfortable working with global, distributed teams (advanced English). Scope and Autonomy • Manages a single program/team end-to-end, setting operating rhythms and standards within agreed policies and budgets. • Makes day-to-day and tactical strategic decisions for the program; escalates only non-standard or high-impact items. • Direct line management for PMs/Coordinators and dotted-line influence over cross-functional partners. • Owns the client relationship for the program and partners with the Lead Quality Manager on outcomes. Experience and Education • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in business, operations, data/engineering, or a related field. Salary: $110K to $130K.