Strategic Project Lead

About Contra Labs

Contra Labs is a human-centered research lab studying how creatives use AI, how tools can better serve creative work, and how to protect originality in an increasingly homogenized 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 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 unique requirements, timelines, and quality standards. We need an operator to own this work end-to-end, bridging clients, creative experts, and internal engineering teams.

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 through final readout
• Quality Assurance: Ensure data quality, inter-rater reliability, and real-time course correction; maintain and enforce quality standards
• Analysis & Storytelling: Conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis, translate findings into actionable recommendations, reports, and workshops
• Systems & Process: Transform repeated work into clean, measurable processes; partner with engineering on tooling that accelerates reliability
• Market Narrative: Develop case studies and benchmark publications that establish Contra Labs' market position

About You

• You design and execute studies professionally—scoping questions, running research, analyzing data, and translating findings into actionable direction
• You understand creative quality deeply and can articulate why something works; you distinguish personal preference from objective quality signals
• You thrive in ambiguity and can build clarity where none exists; you see operational problems and solve them
• You communicate clearly across technical, creative, and business audiences; you translate between different ways of thinking
• You care about rigor and shipping; you hold high standards and move fast

Location & Work

This is a fully remote role based worldwide.