Senior Engagement Manager📍 Location: [Bay Area location] / Remote-flexible💼 Employment Type: Full-Time🏢 Department: GTM / GrowthAbout Us[Company] is a model training and evaluation startup headquartered in [Bay Area location], with a delivery office in [international location]. We are founded by alumni of top technical and business schools and ex-[Big Tech], and we work with leading AI labs and enterprise teams on high-quality human data, evaluations, and AI-first scaled operations.
We believe frontier AI systems are only as good as the data, evaluations, and human judgment behind them. Our work sits at the intersection of customer needs, research ambition, and operational execution. That makes the work high-touch, technical, ambiguous, and execution-heavy.
We are looking for people who can operate with urgency, write clearly, build trust, and turn ambiguity into outcomes.
About the Role
We are hiring a Senior Engagement Manager. The Senior Engagement Manager is the technical voice of the customer inside the company. You will work with Account Executives, delivery, research, quality, and product teams once a customer opportunity becomes real: when it needs scoping, feasibility checks, pricing inputs, planning, customer management.
Your near-term north star will be simple: make sure our customers' sentiments remain high and that we build solid partnerships.
What You'll Do
- Own the customer interface for active opportunities from scoping through pilot, production and delivery
- Translate customer asks into delivery-ready requirements: task definitions, output expectations, quality criteria, timelines, assumptions, and unresolved questions
- Check feasibility before commitments are made; bring in delivery, research, quality, or product leaders when the work requires deeper technical judgment
- Maintain a clear pulse on customer sentiment: whether the customer sees the company as responsive, technically credible, clear on requirements, and trustworthy enough to receive more work
- Support pilots by clarifying what the customer is trying to prove, who will evaluate success, what production would look like, and what could block conversion
- Reduce chaos for the customer and for delivery by managing conflicting requirements, pushing back on unclear asks, and preventing contradictory specifications from flowing downstream
- Monitor delivery health from the customer's point of view: quality, consumption, throughput, rejections, feedback loops, and escalations
- Keep customer-facing work from getting lost across calls, Slack, sheets, and unclear ownership.
- Every active workstream should have a clear owner, next step, and deadline
- Escalate platform, tooling, or quality blockers with clear customer impact while keeping product, delivery, and quality teams as the accountable owners of those systems
- What You Will Own
- Customer requirements translated into delivery-ready form
- Customer sentiment and satisfaction for active opportunities and engagements
- Pilot continuity and technical handholding
- Pilot-to-production success criteria and conversion path, in partnership with GTMInternal follow-through on customer-facing commitments
- Expansion signals and customer context for GTM / AE follow-up
What We're Looking For
- We are looking for someone who looks like a technical program manager with client-facing strength.
- You should be:technical enough to understand data work, AI evaluations, quality bars, delivery constraints, and feasibility riskscustomer-facing enough to build trust with senior stakeholders and handle ambiguity without creating panicstructured enough to write clear requirements, follow-ups, summaries, and decision logshigh-ownership enough to chase missing context without waiting for escalationcommercially aware enough to know when GTM should re-enter the conversationdirect enough to push back on unclear asks, unrealistic timelines, or inconsistent customer ideascomfortable operating across sales, delivery, research, quality, and product without confusing collaboration for ownership
Preferred Qualifications
- 6+ years of experience in technical program management, solutions, engagement management, customer-facing operations, consulting, business operations, AI/data delivery, or a similar cross-functional role
- Experience working with enterprise customers, pilots, technical scoping, or production delivery
- Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, human data, model evaluations, data annotation, quality systems, or research-facing delivery
- Strong written communication; you do not rely on meetings alone to create alignment
- Experience in a fast-moving startup or high-ambiguity environment
- Comfort working with globally distributed teams across multiple time zones, including international delivery hubs and customer locations
- Success in This Role Looks Like
- Customers feel the company is responsive, technically credible, and clear on expectations
- Pilots have explicit success criteria and a real conversion path to production
- Delivery teams receive clearer requirements and fewer ambiguous handoffs
- Customer quality feedback reaches the right owner quickly
- Expansion signals are surfaced to GTM with enough context to act
- Fewer opportunities fail because of weak requirement translation, avoidable quality surprises, unclear ownership, or delayed follow-up
- Why Join
- You will work close to the frontier of AI model training, evaluation, and scaled human-data operations.
- The role will put you in the middle of customers, research questions, delivery constraints, and revenue expansion.
- This is a high-agency role for someone who does not want to sit cleanly inside one function.
- You will be expected to create clarity where none exists, protect the customer without overpromising, and help turn promising pilots into durable production relationships.
- If you are excited by technical ambiguity, customer trust, and the operational details that make AI data work succeed, we would like to meet you.
