Our mission is to architect AI that learns from and interacts with the world like humans do.
We're pioneering the model architectures that will make this possible. Our founding team met as PhDs at the Stanford AI Lab, where we invented State Space Models or SSMs, a new primitive for training efficient, large-scale foundation models. Our team combines deep expertise in model innovation and systems engineering paired with a design-minded product engineering team to build and ship cutting edge models and experiences.
We're funded by leading investors at Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with Factory, Conviction, A Star, General Catalyst, SV Angel, Databricks and others. We're fortunate to have the support of many amazing advisors, and 90+ angels across many industries, including the world's foremost experts in AI.
The Role
We are looking for a Product and Research Operations Manager to design, scale, and operate Cartesia's global scaled evaluation workforce. This role sits at the intersection of product operations, data operations, and vendor management, and directly impacts model quality and customer outcomes. You will own the end-to-end workforce system: hiring pipelines, vendor strategy, workforce planning, quality control, and operational performance.
You are building a production system of humans-in-the-loop for AI, translating ambiguous product needs into operational workflows and partnering across product, engineering, data, and customer-facing teams to support real-world evaluation at scale.
Your Impact
Design and implement workforce structure across languages, skill tiers, and use cases, including evaluators, auditors, and leads for TTS products
Build capacity models to support continuous eval pipelines and data production workflows
Own relationships with vendors such as data annotation firms and contractor platforms, negotiating rate cards, SLAs, and throughput guarantees
Decide on build, buy, or hybrid workforce models and continuously benchmark cost and performance across regions
Design multi-layer QA systems spanning self-checks, peer review, audits, and gold tasks
Define and track inter-rater reliability, error rates by category, and annotator-level performance distributions
Build escalation and retraining workflows to maintain quality at scale
Run day-to-day operations including task allocation, throughput tracking, and SLA adherence
Build systems to reduce evaluator fatigue, rotate task types, and maintain consistency across large-scale evaluations
Partner with tooling teams to improve evaluator UX and with data teams to ensure clean, structured outputs for model training
What You Bring
5+ years in operations, workforce management, or data annotation systems
Experience managing large contractor or vendor-based workforces
Proven ability to scale operations from zero to production
Systems thinking with the ability to design scalable operational frameworks
Strong analytical skills with comfort around metrics like inter-rater reliability, precision, and throughput
Ability to execute quickly under ambiguity with close attention to quality and edge cases
Nice to Have
Experience in AI/ML data operations or evaluation pipelines
Background in audio, speech, or language-related workflows
Familiarity with QA systems and annotation tooling
Experience with marketplace platforms such as Upwork or Mercor
Exposure to multilingual operations
Note: Cartesia participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with Form I-9 information to confirm employment eligibility after hire.
In-office policy: We’re an in-person team based out of offices in San Francisco, London and Bangalore. We love being in the office, hanging out together, and learning from each other every day.
Visa sponsorship: We provide visa sponsorship support and assess each circumstance on a case-by-case basis. However, visa sponsorship is dependent on many factors, including the role you are applying for, and the location you are going to be based, and so we can't always guarantee success. Your Recruiter will work with you to understand your visa sponsorship needs from the first call.
We ship fast. All of our work is novel and cutting edge, and execution speed is paramount. We have a high bar, and we don’t sacrifice quality or design along the way.
We support each other. We have an open & inclusive culture that’s focused on giving everyone the resources they need to succeed.
Compensation Competitive base salary alongside attractive equity package.
Health Insurance Fully covered medical insurance along with dental and vision for you and your family.
Parental Leave 9 weeks paternity & 12 weeks maternity leave
401(k)
Commuter Allowance A monthly stipend to help you get to and from the office.
Flexible PTO Take as much time as you need to recharge your batteries.
Meals & Snacks Lunch, dinner and plenty of snacks, provided daily.
Your own personal Yoshi
Cartesia is an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status.
Compensation Range: $160K - $190K
