Strategic Project Management Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Location: Bay Area / San Mateo, CA

Employment Type: Full-Time

Department: Operations / Strategic Projects

Deccan AI is a model training and evaluation startup headquartered in the Bay Area, with a delivery office in Hyderabad. We are founded by IIT Bombay, IIM Ahmedabad, and ex-Google alumni, and we work with leading AI labs and enterprise teams on high-quality human data, evaluations, and AI‑first scaled operations.

We believe frontier AI systems are only as good as the data, evaluations, and human judgment behind them. Our work sits at the intersection of customer needs, research ambition, and operational execution. That makes the work high‑touch, technical, ambiguous, and execution‑heavy.

We are looking for people who can operate with urgency, write clearly, build trust, and turn ambiguity into outcomes.

We are hiring a Strategic Projects Lead to run high‑priority customer and operating initiatives across Deccan’s human‑data, model‑evaluation, and generative‑AI work.

This is a high‑ownership role for someone who can move between operator, product thinker, and customer‑facing program lead. You will take ambiguous strategic work — a new customer program, a difficult eval, a fast‑growing data operation, a quality turnaround, a new workflow, or an executive‑priority initiative — and turn it into a clear plan with owners, timelines, quality bars, operating rhythm, and measurable outcomes.

You will work across GTM, Engagement Management, delivery, research, quality, product, and engineering. The job is not to sit in one function. The job is to make important work move faster without losing rigor.

• Lead strategic cross‑functional projects from early scoping through launch, execution, and scale.
• Turn ambiguous customer or internal asks into clear operating plans: requirements, deliverables, owners, timelines, quality criteria, risks, and open questions.
• Partner with Engagement Managers and GTM to understand customer priorities, pilot goals, success criteria, and expansion paths.
• Partner with delivery, research, quality, product, and engineering teams to design workflows that can actually run: task design, reviewer loops, evaluation methods, QA checks, tooling needs, staffing plans, and escalation paths.
• Own execution rhythm for high‑priority programs: weekly plans, progress updates, blocker removal, metric reviews, customer‑facing summaries, and executive‑level status reporting.
• Build dashboards, trackers, or lightweight operating systems that make program health visible: throughput, quality, cost, SLA, rework, rejection patterns, utilization, customer feedback, and delivery risk.
• Identify where human‑data operations are breaking down and fix the system, not just the immediate symptom.
• Help Deccan launch new project types in areas like model evaluations, expert data, RLHF, domain‑specific annotation, multimodal workflows, language evals, and AI‑first enterprise operations.
• Create repeatable playbooks so the next strategic project is easier to scope, staff, price, launch, and operate.
• Communicate clearly when a project is off‑track, when requirements are weak, or when Deccan should push back before committing.

• Execution of selected strategic customer and internal programs.
• Translation of ambiguous opportunities into operating plans that teams can run.
• Cross‑functional alignment across GTM, Engagement Management, delivery, research, quality, product, and engineering.
• Program health visibility: milestones, metrics, risks, blockers, customer feedback, and executive updates.
• Launch and stabilization of new data, eval, and AI‑operations workflows.
• Playbooks, templates, and operating mechanisms that make strategic projects repeatable.
• Escalation clarity: who owns the decision, what is blocked, and what needs to happen next.

We are looking for someone who combines consulting‑style problem solving, startup operating intensity, and enough technical judgment to work credibly in AI data and evaluation workflows.

You should be:

• structured enough to turn messy work into crisp plans, written updates, decision logs, and next steps;
• technical enough to understand data quality, evaluation design, model behavior, workflow constraints, and basic analytics without needing to be the deepest engineer in the room;
• operationally sharp enough to diagnose why a project is slipping: unclear requirements, bad incentives, weak QA, tooling gaps, staffing issues, or customer‑side ambiguity;
• customer‑facing enough to build trust, explain tradeoffs, and keep senior stakeholders calm without hiding problems;
• analytical enough to use data to understand throughput, quality, cost, risk, and program health;
• high‑agency enough to chase missing context, unblock teams, and create structure without waiting for permission;
• direct enough to push back on unclear asks, unrealistic timelines, or decisions that will create downstream failure;
• collaborative enough to work across functions without confusing coordination for ownership.

• 4+ years of experience in strategic operations, program management, consulting, product operations, technical program management, AI/data operations, marketplace operations, delivery leadership, or a similar cross‑functional role.
• Experience leading complex projects across multiple teams with unclear starting conditions and high execution pressure.
• Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, human data, data annotation, RLHF, model evaluations, quality systems, or research‑facing delivery.
• Strong analytical skills; SQL, Python, spreadsheets, dashboards, or similar data tooling experience is a plus.
• Strong written communication; you can turn ambiguity into a short, useful document rather than another meeting.
• Experience working with customers, executives, or senior internal stakeholders in ambiguous environments.
• Comfort working across Bay Area, Hyderabad, and customer time zones.
• Experience in a fast‑moving startup, high‑growth operations team, consulting environment, or AI/data company is a strong plus.

• Strategic projects launch with clear owners, requirements, milestones, metrics, and escalation paths.
• Customers and internal leaders have a reliable view of what is happening, what is blocked, and what decisions are needed.
• Delivery teams receive clearer scopes and fewer late‑breaking surprises.
• New data and eval workflows move from one‑off efforts into repeatable playbooks.
• Quality, throughput, cost, and customer feedback are visible early enough for the team to act.
• Cross‑functional teams move faster because the Strategic Projects Lead creates clarity instead of adding process.
• Deccan can take on more complex, higher‑value AI data and evaluation work because strategic initiatives are run with rigor.

At Deccan AI, you will work close to the frontier of AI model training, evaluation, and scaled human‑data operations. The hardest work is rarely cleanly owned by one team. It lives between customer ambition, research uncertainty, delivery constraints, quality bars, and business urgency.

This is a high‑agency role for someone who wants to be trusted with the company’s most important messy problems. You will help Deccan turn strategic opportunities into operating systems, customer trust, and durable revenue.

If you are excited by AI, human data, ambiguous execution, and the chance to build the operating backbone for a fast‑growing company, we would like to meet you.