This role will be responsible for leading operations for the recently established AI Enablement Service Line, managing a distributed team of AI Data experts, Program and Production Managers and Quality Managers. The AIE practice is responsible for developing, annotating and validating multilingual audio, visual and text-based datasets of varied complexity created for training enterprise clients’ AI applications, i.e. Conversational AI, summarization engines, search and indexing engines and alike. The Director will apply their knowledge of NLP/NLU dataset development to recognize patterns, identify opportunities, study and solve business questions, and translate them into valuable generic and custom business solutions to further strengthen the Welocalize AIE offering. The Director role will build relationships and engage with business partners across the organization (Talent Management, NLP, Development, QualOps) to ensure the profitability of the Service Line via process improvement and systems and tools optimization. An individual in this role should be comfortable navigating ambiguity, adept at problem solving, effective at communicating both within and outside of the organization, results oriented, and strong at critical and analytical thinking.

This position is available for remote work within the United States.

Responsibilities

• Continue with establishing the processes, the team structure, identify the gaps in the personnel needed for successful delivery
• While overseeing the practice day-to-day operations create the framework for the direct reports to be able to own the execution 
• Engage with clients and prospects during the discovery and program design phase 
• Collaborate with Sales and Marketing on the Service Line Marketing Strategy 

Requirements

• Education: University degree (BA/BS or above) in Linguistics, Business Administration or an adjacent field
• Experience: 10+ Years' Experience in the fields of Operations Management and Data Annotation

Skillset

• Minimum 5 years senior leadership experience in data annotation/generation industry leading internal teams of 10+ managers and individual contributors and extensive external teams of freelancers and contractors 
• Strong business acumen and demonstrated focus on business impact
• Ability to delegate work to others while ensuring that deliverables are met 
• Demonstrated ability of applying data analytics to program/project planning and post-mortem activities  
• A strong passion for solving complex business problems using a logical and analytical mindset
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Ability to work with business partners across the organization to collect, learn, and understand business objectives and business requirements.
• Skilled in applying judgment to balance process compliance with achievement of business objectives
• Ability to coach manager and director-level direct and skip-level reports on all aspects of department’s processes, tools and deliverables targeting independent process execution with minimal supervision 
• Ability to assess a program scope and the team's ability to execute and make staffing decisions accordingly 
• Strong understanding of core Agile and similar project management and development principles 
• Outcome oriented with the ability to drill down from the big picture to process details and make adjustments targeting the most optimal outcomes 
• Ability to communicate objectives, plans, status and results clearly 
• Exceptional leadership skills and ability to influence and inspire