Project Lead, AI Model Training
- Role
- Unknown
- Experience
- Senior
- Employment
- Full-time
- Company size
- Startup
Open to CA, US only. Set where you work from to check your eligibility.
No BS summary
NewtonX is expanding its Delivery team and hiring a Project Lead to own client engagements end-to-end, from scoping through delivery, on its data operations platform. The role involves managing expert-generated datasets for AI model training and evaluation, including running complex agentic-workflow evaluations.
Optional skills
About NewtonX
NewtonX is a B2B insights company trusted by the world's most innovative companies to make high-stakes decisions with confidence. We combine a verified network of business professionals with AI-powered research tools to deliver research intelligence faster, more precise, and more defensible than traditional methods.
Our clients include Google, Microsoft, TikTok, DoorDash, Stripe, and Coinbase. Our research has been cited by Fortune, Forbes, TechCrunch, Adweek, and the Wall Street Journal.
NewtonX has raised $47M from investors including Two Sigma Ventures, Third Prime, XFund, and Citi Ventures.
ABOUT THE ROLE
NewtonX is turning the world’s largest verified expert network into the evaluation, post-training, and audit data that enterprises and AI labs need to deploy AI in production. We build high-quality, expert-generated datasets that train and evaluate frontier AI systems — spanning domain eval sprints, custom data solutions, model behavior audits, agentic RL environments, and domain QA-as-a-service.
This business is taking off, and we are expanding our Delivery team to meet it. We are hiring a Project Lead to own client engagements end to end, from scoping through delivery, on our data operations platform. You will be the client’s point of contact and the person accountable for the operational execution and the quality outcome across a portfolio of concurrent projects — many of them complex agentic-workflow evaluations.
Our commercial team wins the business. From the moment it is won, it is yours: you scope it, configure it, run it, defend its quality, and deliver it. When a client asks how it is going, you are the person who answers. When the spec turns out to be wrong at scale, you are the person who fixes it.
You will be joining a small, early Delivery team, working closely with our ML Lead, annotator delivery team, commercial team, and product and engineering. Because the team is still young, you will help build and scale the delivery function itself — the playbooks, quality standards, and processes that everyone who follows you will run on — and you will have direct exposure to NewtonX’s C-level. This is a ground-floor seat in a business we expect to grow extremely quickly, with the career path that comes with it.
Location: Remote (US or Canada) or Hybrid (New York City)
IN THIS ROLE YOU WILL
- SCOPE AND SET UP EVERY ENGAGEMENT
- Translate the client’s need into a bounded statement of work. Turn a training or evaluation objective into concrete task design, a defined quality bar (defect-rate and inter-annotator agreement targets), an annotator profile, and — for agentic projects — an environment and tool strategy.
- Configure the project on the platform. Stand up the multi-layer quality pipeline, task forms, grading rubrics, annotator enablement, and routing.
- Author the first-draft guidelines and gold set with the ML Lead, and pressure-test them before production starts. Most delivery failures are scoping failures; your job is to catch them here.
- RUN PRODUCTION
- Own quality, throughput, and cost. Track how each project is performing against its targets, diagnose what is drifting, and act before it reaches the client.
- Manage the annotator pool on your projects. Assignment, layer access, qualification, and performance — working with the annotator delivery team to get the right experts on the right tasks.
- Keep annotators aligned. Run project channels and calibration sessions, handle exceptions and escalations, and adjust configuration as the work reveals what the spec missed.
- OWN THE CLIENT RELATIONSHIP
- Be the client’s point of contact throughout — scoping calls, mid-project updates, quality escalations, and delivery.
- Manage expectations against scope, and diagnose acceptance issues candidly when they arise. Clients trust the person who tells them early.
- Grow the account from the inside. Surface expansion opportunities and new use cases to the commercial team, and act as the technical subject matter expert on calls when new work is being scoped.
- DELIVER AND CLOSE OUT
- Assemble and deliver batches on schedule, and own the handoff to the client.
- Run client acceptance testing against agreed criteria, capture sign-off, and trigger the commercial milestone.
- Run the post-mortem and feed what you learned back into guidelines, tooling, and the next scope.
- BUILD THE MACHINE AS YOU RUN IT
- Turn each engagement into repeatable process. Codify what works into playbooks, templates, and quality standards that the next Project Lead can run from day one.
- Be the voice of delivery to product and engineering. You will be running on a platform that is still being built; what you flag gets built.
WHO YOU ARE
- 3+ years of experience in data labeling, RLHF/SFT, or AI evaluation delivery — you have shipped real annotation or evaluation projects at a data labeling company (Scale, Surge, Mercor, Snorkel, Handshake, Centific, Labelbox, SuperAnnotate, or similar) or inside an AI lab. This is a firm requirement; we are not looking for a generalist project manager.
- An operator who goes into the weeds. You are comfortable owning quality metrics, debugging a stalled queue, and rewriting a rubric that is not holding up in production.
- Client-facing and credible. You can run a scoping call with a technical buyer, deliver bad news without losing the room, and translate operational mechanics into terms a client cares about.
- Analytically rigorous. Data analysis skills using SQL or Python are a strong plus.
- A builder. Processes here are young and some are still manual. You want to stand things up rather than inherit a finished machine.
- Exceptional at holding many threads. You will run several concurrent projects with different clients, quality bars, and annotator pools.
- Adaptable and resilient. Specs change, clients change their minds, and no two weeks look the same. You roll with it and find the new angle.
- Discreet. This role handles annotator personal data and client-confidential information under strict data-security and confidentiality standards; all work stays within approved systems.
- Valid US or Canadian work authorization required. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
WHAT WE OFFER
- Competitive compensation: $150-240K total on target compensation + participation in our company stock buying program
- Massive impact: the chance to help build a new business unit from the ground up with direct C-level influence at an extremely fast-growing late-stage startup
- Fast-track career growth toward operational and commercial leadership
- Excellent medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 401k match with immediate vesting
- Health savings/flexible savings account, and pre-tax commuter benefits
- Paid time off: vacation, holidays, sick, and parental leave
- A diverse, collaborative, and positive culture where we invest in and celebrate each other’s success (happy hours, team projects, and retreats)
NewtonX is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics.
What you'll do
- Translate the client's need into a bounded statement of work. Turn a training or evaluation objective into concrete task design, a defined quality bar (defect-rate and inter-annotator agreement targets), an annotator profile, and — for agentic projects — an environment and tool strategy.
- Configure the project on the platform. Stand up the multi-layer quality pipeline, task forms, grading rubrics, annotator enablement, and routing.
- Author the first-draft guidelines and gold set with the ML Lead, and pressure-test them before production starts.
- Own quality, throughput, and cost. Track how each project is performing against its targets, diagnose what is drifting, and act before it reaches the client.
- Manage the annotator pool on your projects. Assignment, layer access, qualification, and performance — working with the annotator delivery team to get the right experts on the right tasks.
- Keep annotators aligned. Run project channels and calibration sessions, handle exceptions and escalations, and adjust configuration as the work reveals what the spec missed.
- Be the client's point of contact throughout — scoping calls, mid-project updates, quality escalations, and delivery.
- Manage expectations against scope, and diagnose acceptance issues candidly when they arise.
- Grow the account from the inside. Surface expansion opportunities and new use cases to the commercial team, and act as the technical subject matter expert on calls when new work is being scoped.
- Assemble and deliver batches on schedule, and own the handoff to the client.
- Run client acceptance testing against agreed criteria, capture sign-off, and trigger the commercial milestone.
- Run the post-mortem and feed what you learned back into guidelines, tooling, and terms.
- Turn each engagement into repeatable learning. Codify what works into playbooks, templates, and quality standards that the next Project Lead can run from day one.
- Be the voice of delivery to product and engineering.
What they require
- 3+ years of experience in data labeling, RLHF/SFT, or AI evaluation delivery — you have shipped real annotation or evaluation projects at a data labeling company (e.g., Scale, Surge Data, Mercor, Snorkel AI, Handshake, Centific, Labelbox, SuperAnnotate) or inside an AI lab. This is a firm requirement; we are not looking for a generalist project manager.
- An operator who goes into the weeds. You are comfortable owning quality metrics, debugging a stalled queue, and rewriting a rubric that is not holding up in production.
- Client-facing and credible. You can run a scoping call with a technical buyer, deliver bad news without losing the room, and translate operational mechanics into terms a client cares about.
- Analytically rigorous. Data analysis skills using SQL or datasets are a strong plus.
- A builder. Processes here are young and some are still manual.
- Exceptional at holding many threads. You will run several concurrent projects with different clients, quality bars, and annotator pools.
- Adaptable and resilient. Specs change, clients change their minds, and no two weeks look the same.
- Discreet. This role handles annotator personal data and client-confidential information under strict data-security and confidentiality standards; all work stays within approved systems.
- Valid US or Canadian work authorization required. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation: $150-240K total on target compensation plus participation in our company stock buying program
- Massive impact: the chance to help build a new business unit from the ground up with direct C-level influence at an extremely fast-growing late-stage startup
- Fast-track career growth toward operational and commercial leadership
- Excellent medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 401k match with immediate vesting
- Health savings/flexible savings account, and pre-tax commuter benefits
- Paid time off: vacation, holidays, sick, and parental leave
- A diverse, collaborative, and positive culture where we invest in and celebrate each other’s success (happy hours, team projects, and retreats)
- Equal opportunity workplace, no discrimination based on race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, status as a protected veteran, disabled status, or any other legally protected characteristic.
B2B market research company based in New York City