Head of Technical Program Management, Applied AI

About LILT

AI is changing how the world communicates — and LILT is leading that transformation.

We're on a mission to make the world's information accessible to everyone, regardless of the language they speak. We use cutting-edge AI, machine translation, and human-in-the-loop expertise to translate content faster, more accurately, and more cost-effectively without compromising on brand, voice, or quality.

At LILT, we empower our teammates with leading tools, global collaboration, and growth opportunities to do their best work. Our company virtues—Work together, win together; Find a way or make one; Dance in the customer's shoes; Quicker than they expect; Quality is Job 1—guide everything we do. We are trusted by Intel Corporation, Canva, the United States Department of Defense, the United States Air Force, ASICS, and hundreds of global Enterprises. Backed by Sequoia, Intel Capital, and Redpoint, we’re building a category-defining company in a $50B+ global translation market being redefined by AI.

About the Role

As Head of Technical Program Management for Applied AI, you will drive and own all project execution, customer outcomes, and delivery excellence across LILT’s Applied AI practice

for the world's leading AI labs. Serving as builder and coach, you will lead the people, operations, and systems behind every Applied AI engagement — multilingual and multimodal training data, evaluations, and benchmark programs — and make sure each one ships on time, on budget, and to the highest quality bar. You are responsible for constructing LILT’s technical program management capabilities from the ground up while actively developing, mentoring, and elevating a high-performing team. Operating at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and industrial-scale execution, you hold total accountability for every customer engagement —ensuring every deliverable across your entire team meets the highest standards of precision, speed, and technical rigour.

This is an operator's role: you will balance high-stakes operational ownership with a builder and coach mindset. You will manage and run a high-volume, high-velocity delivery organization: Technical Program Managers, project managers, and the expert and vendor workforces behind them. You bring equal passion to building the operational systems and cadence, capacity models, quality systems, and execution frameworks that power our AI lab deliverables, and coaching your team to operate as high-agency "CEOs" of their respective customer portfolios, , all while staying close enough to the work to step into a critical program or a customer escalation when it matters. You are technically fluent enough to partner with researchers and engineers, but your edge is turning complex, ambiguous customer requirements into reliable, repeatable delivery. While you empower your team to drive day-to-day execution, the buck stops with you for overall portfolio health, customer retention, program SLAs, and delivery outcomes.

Responsibilities

• End-to-end Practice Ownership: Serve as the single point of accountability for customer outcomes across all Applied AI programs — technical delivery, project work and timelines, quality SLAs, margin, and customer satisfaction. You own top-line program success metrics, quality SLAs, delivery timelines, and customer satisfaction across all Applied AI projects.

• Lead and scale the delivery team: Recruit, mentor, and scale a world-class team of TPMs and project managers. Set clear goals, coach for ownership, unblock across complex technical and operational challenges, and build a team that runs complex programs independently.

• Run delivery operations and capacity planning at volume: Own capacity planning, staffing, and resource allocation across programs. Turn shifting customer demand into reliable production plans and delivery forecasts that protect speed and margin.

• Build the delivery operating system: Standardize intake, scoping, kickoff, quality control, reporting, and close-out. Turn individual program learnings into repeatable playbooks, systems, processes, and dashboards.

• Strategic Customer Partnership & Escalations: Act as executive partner and delivery sponsor for key frontier AI lab relationships. Proactively co-develop benchmark transcreations with customer research leads. Lead escalations, run business reviews, and help shape scope, pricing, and timelines with Sales.

• Own quality: Partner with Research to standardize quality control across delivery, including embedded calibration, gold sets, inter-annotator agreement, LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, model eval pipelines and root-cause analysis into every customer program, ensuring that quality issues are proactively controlled and mitigated.

• Manage the expert and vendor workforce: Work with Expert Supply and Operations to qualify, manage, and engage multilingual contributors and vendors, with clear performance and cost metrics.

• Cross-functional Workflow Design and Execution:…