{"id":227917,"url":"https://alion.io/job/outset-program-manager-research-operations","title":"Program Manager - Research Operations","company":{"id":450353,"name":"Outset","domain":"outset.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/outset-3","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":5,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":29,"computed_at":"2026-10-31T05:58:55Z"}},"role":"Management","role_family":"Management","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States","New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":150000,"max":200000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":200000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[],"status":"closed","first_seen_at":"2026-09-01T18:28:33Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-01","last_verified_at":"2026-10-29T23:22:02Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":"2026-10-29T23:22:02Z","days_open":58,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":58},"description":"Outset invented a better way to do research: AI-powered user interviews.\nGlobal brands like Hubspot, Microsoft, Uber and Nestle use Outset to achieve deeper, qualitative insights about their users at unprecedented speed and scale.\nThe research industry is massive (>$140B and growing) and ripe for disruption. Incumbents are outdated, slow, and burdened by high-cost services. That's our opportunity.\nOutset is backed by top Silicon Valley investors and raised a $30M Series B in December 2025-less than six months after our Series A-led by Radical Ventures with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), 8VC, Y Combinator, and Adverb Ventures.\nThe raise follows a breakout year, with our business growing 8x as enterprise customers across industries adopt our category, AI-moderated research, as the new standard for understanding people.\nWe’re a tight-knit team serving some of the world’s largest enterprises.\nParticipant recruitment at Outset spans a global partner network, internal process, and the product experience itself - and this role owns all three. Rather than running recruitment study by study, you'll build the system that makes it predictable at scale. You'll be Outset's authority on recruitment: the connective tissue between our partners, our teams, and our product.\nResponsibilities\nOwn partner performance and communication, with a system to assess and continually optimize each partner's quality, reliability, and best-fit use cases.\n\nNegotiate preferred rates and commercial terms, and build the feasibility process (incidence rates, targeting, which vendor for which use case) that keeps recruitment predictable as volume grows.\n\nDesign and document the end-to-end recruitment process, from intake through delivery - with fill-time benchmarks by audience/screening criteria and a clear playbook for tracking and escalating at-risk projects.\n\nBuild the internal enablement and training that gets the GTM team up to speed and confident in how recruitment works.\n\nPartner with Product and Engineering on the recruitment experience - fraud detection, identity verification, quality flagging, refunds - bringing structured, evidence-backed problems into the product roadmap.\n\nIdentify and spec internal tooling that reduces manual ops work.\n\nTranslate how recruitment works into content for two audiences: best-practice guidance for Account Directors/AEs, and customer-facing explanations of our role, our partners' role, and what to expect.\n\nQualifications\n5-10 years in research operations, participant recruitment, or panel/vendor management, with deep expertise in digital qualitative recruitment; experience with quantitative recruitment is a plus\n\nHands-on understanding of how participant recruitment actually works: panels and marketplaces, screeners, incidence and feasibility, soft launches, quotas, incentives, fraud, and quality control.\n\nTrack record managing vendors and partners - selecting, negotiating, holding accountable, managing spend.\n\nGenuine program management ability - you can hold a messy, cross-functional problem in your head, sequence it, and drive it to a working system.\n\nExperience at both a large organization and a startup. We want the enterprise process instincts and the scrappiness to build fast without waiting for permission.\n\nStrong communicator - able to distill complex, cross-functional information into clear training, documentation, playbooks, and customer-facing content.\n\nComfortable with AI tooling for content and automation; experience building AI tooling/dashboards a plus.\n\nHighly independent - this role is built for someone who defines priorities as much as executes them.\n\nBonus: experience at a research platform, panel provider, or research agency.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3735,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Market Research","AI Agents"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-05T09:30:10Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-10-29T23:22:02Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":null,"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":200000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/outset-program-manager-research-operations","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/outset-program-manager-research-operations.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-31T08:16:04Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":12281,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-01T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":450353},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=450353"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Foutset-program-manager-research-operations"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Foutset-program-manager-research-operations"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Foutset-program-manager-research-operations"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/outset-program-manager-research-operations\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Foutset-program-manager-research-operations"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":227917}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"outset.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":227917},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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