Strategic AI Lead

About the Role

Snorkel AI is hiring a Strategic AI Lead (SAIL) to run our highest-stakes Data-as-a-Service programs end-to-end. 

You operate like the CEO of your program inside Snorkel, owning its end-to-end success. You are accountable for delivering high-quality outputs on time, while managing revenue and margin as your core metrics. You are responsible for the strategy and execution to consistently maintain and elevate our quality standards, and are the single point of accountability for what ultimately ships and delivers impact for the customer.

The role sits at an intersection Snorkel has lived at since its inception: applied AI rigor, deep domain expertise, and the operational craft of executing complex programs at scale. You are the person who translates a technical requirement into an executable program and delivers it. That means a point of view on what makes training data and evaluation land, the domain fluency to design tasks that produce signals, and the operational muscle to run a multi-million-dollar program at the scale of thousands of expert contributors.

We seek an operator skilled in driving excellence through effective team coordination, monitoring key performance metrics to inform precise action plans, and managing both internal and external communications. Strategic AI Leads are the connective tissue across Clients, Snorkel's Forward Deployed Engineers, Delivery Operations and Researchers, and the Expert Contributor Network - accountable for outcomes, not activity.

Ambiguity is the default, requirements shift week to week, and the best SAILs design the system while running it. If you have a founder's instinct, a consultant's rigor, and an operator's bias for action, this is one of the most exciting seats in AI today.

What You'll Do

• Own the program like a CEO. Own the P&L for your pipeline: accountable for quality, timelines, revenue, margin, and budget. Forecast accurately, surface risks early, and manage spend against plan.
• Be the single-threaded owner across stakeholders. Your program touches client research and engineering teams, Snorkel's own forward deployed engineers, researchers, and growth partners, and the Expert Contributor Network supporting data production. You are the single person who keeps all of that aligned, accountable, and informed. 
• Design the training data program. Translate what the model needs to learn into task definitions, quality rubrics, evaluation criteria, and RL environments. Decide what "great" looks like before expert contributors start producing it.
• Develop and scale the Expert Contributor Network. Define the contributor profile your program needs, work with cross-functional partners to recruit them, and design the training and QA systems that ramp them quickly. Maintain quality standards as volume grows from hundreds to thousands of contributors.
• Build the system from scratch. Translate vague, evolving client requirements into crisp workstreams, success criteria, and milestones. Stand up the workflows, quality systems, and operating rhythms where none exist, then harden and automate them as pipeline scales.
• Monitor, measure, and mitigate. Instrument each program with the right dashboards, KPIs, and a live risk register. Catch regressions and surface risks before clients do. Use data, not intuition, to drive decisions, forecasts, escalations, and mitigations.
• Drive internal and external comms. Set the narrative. Keep Snorkel leadership, client executive sponsors, and the working team aligned through clear, written-first updates that surface progress, risks, and asks without filler.
• Manage the data flows under the hood. Oversee data ingestion, transformation, and storage across multiple systems, leveraging SQL, JSON, Python, and query management to pull, push, and consolidate data from wherever it lives.
• Operate with urgency. Move fast, hold the quality bar, and bias toward shipping. Our clients are racing to ship better models, and our pace has to match, without ever dropping the standard that sets Snorkel apart.

What You'll Bring

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent hands-on experience
• 5+ years in a role where you owned outcomes end-to-end: technical program/project management, founding/early-stage operator, management consulting, or technical product management
• A proven track record of building something from scratch in a resource-constrained, fast-changing environment, and adapting as the ground shifts
• Analytical by default, with hands-on comfort with SQL, JSON and Python when you need to dig into data yourself.
• ML intuition to reason about training data quality, evaluation design, and reward shaping for RL environments - and to engage as a peer with researchers at frontier labs.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication; comfort operating with C-level sponsors and individual contributors in the same day
• A genuine tolerance for ambiguity and a strong bias toward action

Bonus Points:

• Top-tier management consulting or MBA background with a record of turning broad strategic goals into measurable outcomes
• You've been a founder, early-stage operator, or first hire into a function, and you want that kind of ownership again
• Experience running data labeling, SFT, RLHF, or RL environment, especially for frontier labs
• Experience building or managing distributed networks of subject-matter experts or expert contributors (dozens to hundreds/thousands of contributors)
• Exposure to reward design, model evaluation, or post-training pipelines for LLMs
• Experience running commercial or revenue-owning programs at a startup or high-growth organization
• Proficiency with data visualization tools (e.g., Tableau, Power BI, Looker) to instrument projects and communicate insights to diverse audiences
• Fluent in Agile methodologies and tools like Jira and Confluence

Pay Transparency Notice: Depending on your work location, the target annual salary for this position can range as detailed below. Snorkel also includes benefits (including medical, dental, vision and 401(k)).

Pay Range: $150,000-$210,000

 

 

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