Head of Technical Program Management, Applied AI
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- London, UK
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- C level
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Ai engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Accountable Mindset & Ownership: Proven track record as the final owner of large-scale, mission-critical technical portfolios, with direct accountability for project delivery, customer outcomes, and S
- Experience: 10+ years in delivery, operations, or program leadership, including 5+ years managing managers or multi-team delivery organizations.Proven ownership of a large, customer-facing delivery po
- Builder & Coach Mindset: Proven track record of building technical program functions, processes, and systems from scratch, coupled with a deep dedication to coaching, mentoring, and growing talent.
- People Management & Leadership: 5+ years of direct people management experience building and scaling TPM, Product, or Engineering teams within high-growth AI or enterprise tech environments.
- Frontier AI Expertise: Deep, hands-on understanding of the modern AI landscape—including LLMs, multimodal models, training/inference pipelines, and complex dataset diversity (multilingual and multi-do
- 0-to-1 & Scale Experience: Demonstrated ability to build operating systems in high-velocity startup environments and scale them to support high-throughput, mission-critical operations where quality co
- Strong Data Fluency: comfortable using SQL, spreadsheets, or BI tools to run the business on metrics such as throughput, quality, cost per task, and utilization.
- Contemporary Industry Acumen: Working knowledge of the modern AI landscape (LLMs, multimodal models, training and evaluation pipelines) to partner credibly with researchers and engineers.
- Executive Stakeholder Management: Excellent business acumen, executive presence, and communication style with experience building high-trust partnerships with top-tier AI labs, customers, and enterpri
- Education: B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, AI, or a related technical field with 12+ years of industry experience (or Ph.D. with 8+ years).
Nice to have
- Experience at an AI data, human data, or language services company, or delivering for frontier AI labs.
- Experience leading globally distributed teams across time zones.
- Familiarity with Python and modern program tooling (e.g., Linear, Jira, custom analytics) to automate reporting and workflows.
- Fluency in multiple human languages.
Full description
About LILTAI 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.