Program Manager III - Artist Curation Operations Lead - Cupertino, CA

Artist Curation Operations Lead (Contractor)

Location: Cupertino, CA Duration: 12+ months Type: Hybrid (3 days in office/week) Client Music — Content Operations

A job at Client is unlike any other you've had. You'll be challenged. You'll be inspired. And you'll be proud.

Client Music is looking for an Artist Curation Operations Lead to drive the quality, accuracy, and scalability of the artist catalog data that powers artist pages, artist bios, artist images, artist concerts, and the growing set of features that depend on clean, trustworthy artist data. This is a contractor role with potential to convert to full-time for the right person. You will lead our existing manual artist curation operations while simultaneously shaping its future.

Sitting at the intersection of operations, vendor management, and advanced technology, you'll serve as the technical liaison between our curation workflows and the data science and engineering teams building the models, tools, and agentic systems that will scale this work far beyond what manual review can achieve alone. You'll translate messy operational reality into crisp technical requirements, evaluate the solutions that come back, and decide what ships.

What You'll Do:

• Lead artist curation operations end-to-end — covering artist pages, bios, images, disambiguation, and the expanding surface area of artist-facing data — and serve as the primary operational owner and escalation point for vendor teams raising curation questions.
• Bridge communication between business stakeholders and technical teams (Data Science, Engineering, AI/ML), ensuring operational needs are clearly understood and technical tradeoffs are clearly communicated back.
• Translate operational challenges into technical requirements — from artist disambiguation to image quality to bio accuracy — into clear, actionable specifications that engineering and data science teams can execute against.
• Break down ambiguous problems like artist disambiguation into well-scoped, prioritized workstreams, sequenced by impact.
• Start with the highest-leverage slice; iterate from there.
• Evaluate technical proposals and model outputs — participate in design reviews and design eval frameworks (golden sets, quality metrics, error analysis, human-in-the-loop feedback) to judge whether AI/ML solutions are ready for production.
• Design and iterate on manual review tooling that surfaces AI-generated inputs (confidence scores, candidate matches, suggested actions) to accelerate reviewer throughput and accuracy.
• Identify opportunities to apply ML models, agentic workflows, and automation to pressing artist curation problems — running lightweight ROI and impact analyses to distinguish short-term tactical wins from long-term structural solutions.
• Communicate upward — build clear, compelling decks and present progress, tradeoffs, and recommendations to leadership.
• Partner cross-functionally with Engineering, Data Science, Product, Analytics, and peer Operations teams (including Partner Operations and Data Strategy) to surface interdependencies and align priorities.

Who You Are:

• You're energized by ambiguity. Client is known for operating at the edge of what's defined, and you know how to navigate without a map — making progress while the picture is still forming.
• You prioritize ruthlessly. You instinctively ask, "What's the highest-impact thing I could solve first? " before touching anything else.
• You're an independent operator who moves forward with light direction but knows when to pull others in.
• You have exceptional attention to detail — the kind that catches catalog anomalies others miss.
• You communicate precisely and persuasively, in writing, in decks, and in the room with leadership.
• You have technical fluency — comfortable discussing system design, data pipelines, MLOps, model evaluation, and the real-world challenges of deploying AI/ML solutions, without needing to be the one writing the code.
• You have a tinkerer's mentality. You're not afraid to try things, fail quickly, and pivot. You'd rather ship a rough prototype this week and learn from it than design the perfect solution for three months.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 5+ years in operations, program management, or technical product roles with meaningful exposure to AI/ML-driven workflows.
• Demonstrated experience translating operational or product problems into ML requirements and working directly with data scientists and engineers through model development cycles.
• Experience evaluating model outputs — designing eval sets, quality metrics, error analysis, and human feedback loops.
• Experience designing or specifying review/annotation tooling that surfaces AI inputs to human reviewers.
• Conceptual understanding of core analytics principles (sampling, hypothesis testing, statistical measurement).
• Proven ability to produce executive-ready written narratives and presentations.
• Track record of leading ambiguous initiatives end-to-end with minimal direction.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in the music industry or with music metadata, catalogs, rights data, or artist-facing products.
• Familiarity with entity resolution / disambiguation problems (artists, works, identities).
• Exposure to LLM-based workflows, prompt evaluation, or agentic automation.
• Experience collaborating with international stakeholders or managing cross-cultural projects is a plus.
• Comfort querying data (SQL or similar) to investigate issues independently.
• Experience managing vendor or outsourced review teams.
• Tableau or comparable BI tooling.
• A genuine passion for music and curiosity about the systems that power the modern music industry.

Why TalentBurst?

At TalentBurst, we deliver more than talent, we deliver outcomes. We partner with you to move quickly and connect you to opportunities aligned with your skills and long term growth.

Backed by precision, transparency, and results, we connect top talent with leading organizations through trusted partnerships.

We offer competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and retirement options.

TalentBurst is an equal opportunity employer committed to an inclusive and diverse workforce.