Strategic Projects Lead - Audio Data

Own high-priority audio collection and annotation projects from customer requirements through final dataset delivery. Full-time San Mateo, CA Audio Data Operations $140K - $160K

About the role

Besimple AI is building the data and benchmark infrastructure for the next generation of voice AI. We help AI understand people from all languages and accents. We are looking for a Strategic Projects Lead - Audio Data to own high-priority audio data projects end to end through our platform. This is a high-ownership role at the intersection of strategic operations, audio data, AI data delivery, product, and customer execution. You will own complex audio collection and annotation projects from customer requirement to final delivery. Because our platform is still evolving, this role is not just about operating existing workflows. You will also identify gaps in the platform, define product requirements, and work with engineering to build or improve features needed to deliver projects successfully.

What you'll do

• Own audio data collection and annotation projects from kickoff through final customer delivery.
• Translate customer requirements into project specs, contributor workflows, annotation guidelines, QA rubrics, acceptance criteria, and delivery plans.
• Configure and operate projects through Besimple's internal platform.
• Design and run pilots to validate task design, contributor fit, audio quality, tooling, throughput, cost, and QA process before scaling.
• Manage day-to-day execution across contributors, annotators, reviewers, QA leads, and internal tools.
• Monitor project health across volume, quality, rejection rate, rework rate, cost, margin, and timeline risk.
• Identify platform gaps that prevent projects from scaling, then write clear product requirements or feature requests.
• Partner with engineering and product to build or improve tools for project setup, contributor workflows, QA, review, payments, reporting, and delivery.
• Partner with contributor growth to ensure we have the right supply by language, accent, demographic, device, skill set, or task type.
• Build dashboards, trackers, and operating cadences for project execution.
• Communicate project status, risks, tradeoffs, and blockers clearly to founders,

internal teams, and customers.

• Create repeatable playbooks for future audio collection,

transcription, annotation, and QA projects.

• Drive root-cause analysis when projects miss quality,

cost or timeline expectations.

Who we're looking for

We are looking for someone who has personally driven messy, cross-functional projects from zero to completion, ideally in AI data, data labeling, annotation, localization or crowdsourced operations.

• 3-7+ years of experience in data operations,

AI data delivery annotation operations localization project management marketplace operations program management or similar roles.

• Proven experience owning projects end to end from ambiguous requirements to final delivery.
• Strong operator mindset: you can break down vague goals create a plan execute quickly and unblock yourself.
• Experience managing complex workflows involving distributed contributors reviewers contractors vendors or large-scale data operations.
• Strong product sense; able to identify when tooling or platform features are needed and translate operational pain points into clear product requirements.
• Strong analytical ability; comfortable with spreadsheets dashboards funnel metrics QA metrics operational KPIs.
• Excellent written communication; able to write clear instructions guidelines SOPs customer updates internal product specs.
• Strong quality judgment and attention to detail.
• Comfortable balancing quality speed cost customer requirements contributor experience platform constraints.
• Comfortable working in ambiguity and building processes from scratch.
• High ownership low ego willingness to get hands-on with messy operational details.

Bonus qualifications

• Experience at a data labeling AI data localization or crowdsourcing company such as Scale AI Surge AI Appen TELUS Digital RWS TransPerfect DataForce Welocalize Lilt Turing DataAnnotation Outlier Remotasks or similar.
• Experience owning end-to-end delivery of data collection annotation transcription evaluation or QA projects.
• Experience with audio speech voice ASR TTS speech-to-speech transcription podcast or audio production linguistic data.
• Experience building or improving internal tools workflow systems annotation platforms QA systems contributor-facing products.
• Experience designing annotation guidelines QA rubrics reviewer training calibration workflows.
• Experience with multilingual or locale-specific data projects.
• Experience managing large distributed teams of contributors reviewers contractors vendors.
• Basic SQL Python Airtable Retool no-code automation workflow tooling experience.

Example projects you might own

• Launching a new audio collection project in a priority language through our platform.
• Designing the contributor workflow for voice actor auditions recording tasks metadata collection QA review.
• Collecting 1 000+ hours of natural speech from contributors in a specific language or locale.
• Building the operating process for detecting low-quality audio wrong locale synthetic voice background noise incomplete metadata.
• Running a transcription or annotation workflow for speech datasets.
• Identifying that our platform needs a new QA queue reviewer dashboard contributor instruction flow reporting feature then writing the requirements working with engineering to ship it.
• Running a pilot diagnosing quality issues improving the workflow scaling the project to full production.
• Creating a reusable playbook that allows future customer projects to launch faster with fewer manual steps.

What success looks like

You will be successful if Besimple can repeatedly deliver audio datasets that are accepted by customers delivered on time within budget high quality enough for model training operationally repeatable through our platform improving over time in cost quality throughput automation.

Core metrics

• Accepted audio hours delivered
• On-time delivery rate
• Customer acceptance rate
• Rejection and rework rate
• Cost per accepted hour
• Reviewer agreement and QA consistency
• Contributor throughput
• Project margin
• Platform issues identified and resolved
• Number of reusable workflows or features created

Why join us

This is a high-impact role at an early-stage AI company. You will not just manage projects; you will help build the operating system for how high-quality audio data gets produced at scale. You will work directly with the founders own customer-critical projects shape our internal platform define playbooks we use to deliver audio data for frontier voice AI models.