Special Project Lead

About Contra Labs

Contra Labs is a human-centered research lab studying how creatives use AI, how tools can serve creative work better, and how to protect originality. We connect a global network of top creative talent with frontier AI labs and product companies, grounding research in real creative workflows to define quality standards across design, video, imagery, and beyond. Our work powers benchmarking, evaluation, and post-training for leading models and applications.

Why This Role Exists

We are scaling across client engagements including post-training dataset creation, benchmarking programs, and ongoing evaluation partnerships. Each project spans different AI labs, creative-tool companies, and research teams with varying requirements, timelines, and quality standards. We need an operator to own this work end-to-end, serving as a bridge between clients needing data, creative experts producing it, and internal engineering teams building tooling.

What You'll Own

• Methodology: Design annotation protocols, rubrics, and evaluation frameworks for creative and multimodal outputs.
• Delivery: Manage scope, evaluator staffing, quality routing, timelines, and client relationships from kickoff to final readout.
• Quality Assurance: Ensure data quality, inter-rater reliability, and implement real-time course corrections. You set and maintain the quality bar.
• Analysis & Storytelling: Conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis, translating findings into clear reports, recommendations, and actionable workshops for clients.
• Process Systems: Convert repeated work into clean, measurable processes and partner with engineering on tooling that improves speed and reliability.
• Market Narrative: Develop case studies and benchmark publications that establish Contra Labs' market position.

About You

• You design and execute studies for a living—scoping questions, running studies, analyzing data, and translating results into actionable direction.
• You understand creative quality deeply and can articulate why something works. You distinguish between personal preference and objective creative merit.
• You thrive in ambiguity, managing cross-functional teams without direct authority.
• You care about rigor, methodology, and getting things right over moving fast.