Strategic Delivery Lead

About Snorkel

Snorkel AI is the frontier AI data lab, helping teams build the data and environments behind high-performing frontier and agentic AI. We combine technology with research-driven AI data development to create datasets, benchmarks, evals, and custom solutions for real-world AI systems. Founded out of the Stanford AI Lab in 2019, Snorkel works with leading AI labs and enterprises to move from better data to better outcomes.

Excited to help us redefine how AI is built? Apply to be the newest Snorkeler!

About the Role

The Strategic Delivery Lead is the senior operator accountable for turning a pod’s ambition into reliably delivered, high-quality work.

This role is hybrid (

3 days/week in office) in San Francisco, CA or New York City, NY.

You will own the performance of a portfolio spanning samples, off-the-shelf datasets, proprietary data products, and bespoke engagements, connecting GTM, Research, Delivery, Product, Engineering, and Expert AI Supply to ensure the right work is prioritized, staffed, and executed.

This is a highly cross-functional role: you will lead through influence cross functionally and directly manage a team of strategic project leads (SPLs), bring clarity to complex tradeoffs, and personally intervene when quality, delivery, or customer outcomes are at risk.

You will be the pod’s owner for margin performance and operating economics, with a clear view of cost-to-deliver, gross margin, capacity, and the operational choices that drive them. While you will not set pricing, your cost, scope, and delivery inputs will directly inform pricing and commercial decisions.

In partnership with Product, Research and Forward Deployed Engineering, you will translate the domain’s strategy and priority bets into an executable roadmap, mobilizing the teams required to bring it to life and building the systems, rhythms, and playbooks that make the model stronger with every launch.

What You'll Do

• Own your pod’s margin performance and operating economics.
• Be accountable for understanding and improving the cost-to-deliver, gross margin, and financial health of the pod’s work. Track data orders and recognized revenue, challenge staffing and production decisions that erode margin, and provide the cost and delivery inputs that inform pricing decisions. Represent the pod’s commercial and operational performance in the weekly business review.
• Bring the pod’s four-quarter roadmap to life.
• Partner with Product and Research to execute against the strategy and priority bets they have defined for the domain, translating them into an actionable delivery roadmap, mobilizing the right cross-functional teams, and ensuring launches and projects are delivered with the required quality, speed, and economics.
• Manage and grow a team of Strategic Project Leads (SPLs) to ensure projects are delivered on time, and you establish a culture of high performance.
• Serve as the connective tissue between GTM and Delivery.
• Maintain a clear view of the commercial pipeline, ensure pre-sales teams have the support they need, PMM has what it needs, and be able to speak confidently to delivery plans, capacity, risks, and tradeoffs across your portfolio.
• Own the performance of the full project portfolio.
• Ensure every project, across samples, OTS datasets, proprietary data products, and bespoke engagements, is delivered on time, to the highest quality, and against its expected financial return.
• Mobilize the right people at the right time.
• Bring together Research, Engineering, subject-matter experts, Delivery, and Expert AI Supply, negotiating for capacity and driving alignment across teams that do not report directly to you.
• Build and optimize the pod’s workforce plan.
• Partner closely with the heads of Delivery and Expert AI Supply to ensure projects are staffed with the right expertise, talent is deployed effectively, and capacity is planned strategically against current and future demand.
• Obsess over quality, personally.
• Get into the data, understand where quality is breaking down, and force the right conversations and actions when something is wrong, regardless of whether you are the person who can directly fix it.
• Actively manage and improve margin.
• Challenge staffing models, production pipelines, and other cost drivers when work is more expensive than it needs to be, and deliver measurable improvements to the domain’s margin profile.
• Turn recurring failures into systemic fixes.
• When the same problem appears repeatedly, address it in the operating model, tooling, or process rather than continuing to solve it one project at a time.
• Build the pod playbook.
• As one of the first leaders operating this model, establish the rhythms, processes, roles, and best practices that will make the model repeatable for future pods.
• Share learnings across the broader organization.
• Ensure insights, proven practices, and recurring challenges are systematically shared across pods so that each team benefits from what others have learned.

What You'll Bring

• Ownership of a P&L or a business unit
• you have carried a number, made pricing and cost trade-offs, and lived with the result. Consulting-style project leadership without commercial ownership is not the same thing.
• Real depth in a technical domain
• software engineering, computer use and agents, or an adjacent frontier area. You do not need to be a researcher and you do not need to write the pipeline. You do need to be someone a research lead wants in the room: able to hold your own on a technical argument, tell whether this domain's data is good or bad, and know who to pull in when it isn't.
• A track record of building rather than administering.
• Founders, early operators, and people who have stood something up from nothing tend to do well here. We care much more about what you have owned and accomplished than how many people have reported to you.
• Commercial judgment with customers.
• You can run a technical discovery conversation, scope an engagement, and hold a hard margin or timeline conversation without escalating it.
• Comfort with ambiguity and with peers who are not your reports.
• Most of what you need to get done, you will get done through people who do not report to you.
• Seniority.
• Typically 8+ years with meaningful time at the level described above, though we care about the substance far more than the count.
• Prior people management experience
• ; preference 3+ years
• Bonus: experience in AI/ML data, evals or benchmarks; having built a function or business line inside a fast-scaling company; a founder or early-employee background in a technical product.