Strategic Project Lead

About Contra Labs

Contra Labs is a human-centered research lab studying how creatives use AI, how tools serve creative work better, and how to protect originality in an increasingly homogenized digital landscape. 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 benchmarks across design, video, imagery, and beyond.

Why This Role Exists

We are scaling across client engagements in post-training dataset creation, benchmarking programs, and ongoing evaluation partnerships. Each project involves different AI labs, creative-tool companies, and research teams with distinct requirements, timelines, and quality standards. We need an operator to own this work end-to-end.

You'll sit between three groups that don't naturally align: the client needing the data, the creative experts producing it, and the internal engineering team building tooling. Your job is to make all three feel they're working on the same thing and ship results that are both rigorous and genuinely useful.

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: Ensure data quality, inter-rater reliability, and real-time course correction. You hold the bar and the levers to fix it
• Analysis and storytelling: Translate qualitative and quantitative analysis into clear findings, recommendations, reports, and workshops clients act on
• Systems and process: Turn repeated work into clean, measurable processes and partner with engineering on tooling that accelerates and improves reliability
• Market narrative: Create case studies and benchmark publications that establish Contra Labs' market position

About You

• You design studies for a living—scope questions, run studies, analyze data, and translate findings into actionable direction
• You understand creative quality and can explain it clearly, distinguishing personal preference from objective criteria
• You've managed complex cross-functional projects with stakeholders who don't naturally align
• You're comfortable with ambiguity, detail-oriented, and thrive in fast-moving environments
• You care about the work itself and want it to matter