Data Ops Lead

Our client, an innovative AI and Data company, is hiring a Data Operations Lead to join the team in New York. The successful candidate will own the end-to-end data lifecycle, shaping data operations, developing scalable processes, managing external partners and ensuring the highest standards of dataset quality to deliver high-quality, production-ready datasets for leading AI research teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end delivery of high-quality AI training datasets, from raw audio data collection through to production-ready outputs.

• Collaborate with AI research teams and external partners to define, manage and deliver dataset requirements.

• Support the development and execution of commercial data agreements, ensuring successful delivery against customer expectations.

• Design, build and optimize operational workflows across transcription, annotation, quality assurance and dataset production.

• Develop robust data quality frameworks, acceptance criteria and validation processes to maintain delivery standards.

• Lead outsourced and international data operations teams, ensuring quality, efficiency and timely delivery.

• Partner with engineering teams to enhance data pipelines, tooling and operational scalability.

• Identify and implement improvements to increase dataset quality, reliability and operational efficiency.

• Serve as a key liaison between customers, internal stakeholders, engineering teams and external vendors.

• Contribute to the company’s data strategy and help scale data operations as the organization grows.

Skillset

• Minimum of 5 years of experience building and scaling data operations, data pipelines or AI/ML data workflows.

• Proven experience working with audio, speech or multimodal datasets within AI or machine learning environments.

• Strong track record managing external data partnerships, dataset delivery and AI training data programs.

• Experience leading global or outsourced teams focused on data annotation, transcription and quality assurance.

• Strong understanding of data quality frameworks, validation processes and operational performance metrics.

• Technical proficiency across data pipelines, cloud infrastructure and AI/ML workflows.

• Knowledge of digital audio fundamentals, including sample rates, voice activity detection (VAD) and audio processing formats.

• Experience developing or managing AI training datasets for applications such as ASR, TTS, speaker identification or conversational AI.

• Familiarity with audio processing and data tools such as Librosa, FFmpeg, SoX, torchaudio, and cloud platforms including AWS, GCP or Azure.

• Entrepreneurial mindset with the ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment, take ownership and make decisions with limited information.

Benefits

• Salary: $180k – $220k

• Comprehensive benefits package.