Technical Program Manager

About us

We're solving AI's hardest problem: alignment.

 

Encord is the data layer for Physical AI and enterprise, serving as core infrastructure for 300+ of the world's leading AI teams, including Woven by Toyota, Hitachi, Skydio, AbbVie and Dyna, Walden and Agility Robotics. From autonomous vehicles and robotics to sports and healthcare, we're solving AI's hardest problem: turning complex, real-world data into production-ready intelligent systems.

 

We're a team of founders, scientists, quants, researchers, and former Olympians, who’ve helped build some of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley, and alumni of MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial. We’ve raised $110M from legendary technology investors, early backers of companies like Databricks, ElevenLabs and Vercel, and we’re growing at an extraordinary pace.

 

We're looking for exceptional people who want to help build a category-defining company, operating with high urgency and taking real ownership to help shape the future of AI.

 

The role

We're hiring Technical Program Managers in London to run Encord's highest-stakes human data projects end to end — the work for frontier AI labs and physical AI companies, in specialist domains such as medical imaging and robotics, and the data types we are running for the first time. These are the projects where the technical complexity is highest and where a mistake is expensive.

You will work at the point where machine learning requirements become annotation work: translating what a research team actually needs into workflows, standards and instructions that a specialist workforce can execute at volume, then holding the result to a measurable standard.

This is the load-bearing role in the business, and it is a hands-on one. You will know your projects' annotation standards better than anyone at the company, teach them to the annotators producing the work, decide who works on what, judge who is performing and who should come off, resolve the edge cases nobody anticipated, and answer for the delivery timeline. You will run several projects at once, and you will own how they are run.

 

What you'll do

• Own delivery of your projects end to end — throughput, quality and timeline

• Translate complex machine learning requirements into clear annotation workflows, and design the process that produces the data the model actually needs

• Become the deepest expert at Encord on your project's annotation standards, and the person who resolves ambiguity and edge cases as they surface

• Maintain quality through process refinement, auditing and structured feedback loops, rather than through inspection at the end

• Train annotators onto the project and keep them improving — building the material yourself until our Learning & Development Specialist is in place

• Coach your annotation teams: give them the context behind the task, not only the rules, and develop their skills as the work gets harder

• Measure annotator performance and make the calls it implies: who continues, who needs retraining, who comes off the project

• Allocate tasks and manage the queue so that throughput and quality targets are met together rather than traded against each other

• Instrument the project at launch with the Quality Systems Lead — acceptance criteria, sampling plan, reviewer ratio — so it is measurable before the first batch ships

• Produce the delivery reporting for customers, and surface risk early enough that something can still be done about it

• Partner with Product and Engineering on process and tooling improvements, and feed recurring problems back into the playbooks, into training and into the platform

 

Who we're looking for

• You go deep on the detail. Your instinct is to read the whole specification and annotate fifty items yourself before you assign anyone else

• Execution-oriented: you are measured by what shipped, not by what was planned, and you would rather fix a workflow than document one

• Analytically rigorous. You work in numbers — throughput, quality rate, utilisation — and you notice when one is being bought at the expense of another

• Technically fluent enough to work with ML teams on what they need and why, and to pull your own data rather than wait for it

• You make people calls on evidence rather than on impression, and you can have the difficult version of that conversation

• Organised under real load: several projects, several time zones, and requirements that move

• A clear writer and a strong cross-functional communicator. Most of the workforce delivering your project you will never meet in person

• Entrepreneurial: when a date is at risk your first move is to re-plan, not to escalate, and you invent the process where none exists

• Genuinely interested in AI and in what the data you are producing is actually for

 

Experience requirements

• 3–7 years of professional experience, ideally combining operational delivery with analytical work — AI data or annotation operations, strategy consulting, or data and operations roles at leading technology companies

• Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of complex, multi-stakeholder workflows, with responsibility for the outcome rather than the coordination

• Working proficiency in Python or SQL

• Direct experience managing, coaching or performance-managing a distributed workforce

• Track record of holding quality and throughput at the same time, with the numbers to show it

• Experience translating a detailed technical specification into instructions other people can follow

• Bonus: direct experience of annotation, evaluation or model-training workflows

 

Why Encord

• Competitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup

• Clear, accelerated growth opportunities as the company scales rapidly

• Strong in-person culture: 4 days/week

• Daily team lunches & dinners

• Annual learning & development budget

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage

• US employees: 18 paid vacation days plus US public holidays

• UK employees: 25 paid vacation days plus UK public holidays

• Frequent travel opportunities across the U.S., London, and Europe

• Bi-annual company offsites & monthly socials

 

Operating principles

 

_ High agency _

You see something broken, you fix it or find the person who can. We celebrate the people who solve 90% of a problem before anyone asks.

_ Build with care & urgency _

We bear-hug the customer. Former founders and people from fast-moving, high-stakes environments thrive here.

_ Self-aware & hungry _

We stay warm, self-aware, and genuinely hungry. We elevate our peers, and ego doesn't last long.

_ Invent in real time _

We move toward the ambiguity. We’re pragmatic, resourceful, energized by the fact that there's no playbook.

 

If you're looking to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who push you to be better, we'd love to meet you.