Senior Director, AI Data Acquisition and Operations

Location: Mountain View, United States; office attendance required 4 days per week

Salary: USD $202,400–$303,600 per year in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metropolitan area. The typical U.S. base pay range is USD $155,800–$277,200 per year.

Company

AI research organization building frontier models across text, reasoning, and multimodal capabilities for use across products and customer solutions.

What you will do

• Lead the end-to-end acquisition pipeline for human data, annotation programs, and novel training datasets.
• Partner with AI researchers to define data needs and manage pre-training and post-training collections.
• Select vendors, negotiate contracts, and oversee delivery, validation, and alignment with research goals.
• Build scalable procurement systems for vendor spend, wallets, milestones, and delivery tracking.
• Govern a centralized catalog of validated datasets, metadata, and storage locations.
• Coordinate initiatives across Business Development, Procurement, Legal, Compliance, Finance, and Engineering.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree and 8+ years of experience in strategy or finance, data operations, program or technical program management, procurement, or finance integration, or equivalent experience.
• 2+ years of management experience overseeing large-scale data operations for AI research organizations or leading vendors.
• Experience building and leading a team.
• Track record of building scalable systems for spend tracking, delivery milestones, and validation workflows.
• Experience operating in research environments with rapidly shifting priorities and underspecified requirements.

Nice to have

• Bachelor’s degree and 10+ years of experience in technical data operations, procurement program management, or finance systems integration, or equivalent experience.
• 3+ years of management experience overseeing large-scale data operations.
• Fluency with data rights and licensing terms, including collaboration with legal and privacy partners.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on frontier AI models spanning text, reasoning, and multimodal capabilities.
• Collaborate across research, business, procurement, legal, compliance, finance, and engineering functions.
• Benefits and additional compensation may be available depending on role eligibility.