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Program Manager - Research Operations

Outset· Customer Success
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Hybrid (San Francisco), Hybrid (NYC)$150k - $200kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Program Manager responsible for owning and optimizing Outset’s recruitment and participant flow across partners, with end-to-end recruitment process design, partner management, and collaboration with Product and Engineering to scale AI-powered research operations.

Responsibilities

  • Own partner performance and communication, with a system to assess and continually optimize each partner's quality, reliability, and best-fit use cases.
  • Negotiate preferred rates and commercial terms, and build the feasibility process that keeps recruitment predictable as volume grows.
  • Design 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.
  • Build the internal enablement and training that gets the GTM team up to speed and confident in how recruitment works.
  • Partner with Product and Engineering on the recruitment experience — fraud detection, identity verification, quality flagging, refunds — bringing structured, evidence-backed problems into the product roadmap.
  • Identify and spec internal tooling that reduces manual ops work.
  • Translate 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.

Qualifications

  • 5–10 years in research operations, participant recruitment, or panel/vendor management, with deep expertise in digital qualitative recruitment; experience with quantitative recruitment is a plus
  • Hands-on understanding of how participant recruitment actually works: panels and marketplaces, screeners, incidence and feasibility, soft launches, quotas, incentives, fraud, and quality control
  • Track record managing vendors and partners — selecting, negotiating, holding accountable, managing spend
  • Genuine program management ability — ability to hold a messy, cross-functional problem in your head, sequence it, and drive it to a working system
  • Experience at both a large organization and a startup
  • Strong communicator — able to distill complex, cross-functional information into clear training, documentation, playbooks, and customer-facing content
  • Comfortable with AI tooling for content and automation; experience building AI tooling/dashboards a plus
  • Highly independent — this role is built for someone who defines priorities as much as executes them
  • Bonus: experience at a research platform, panel provider, or research agency

Skills

Required:Partner managementRecruitment process designProgram managementCommunication and training materials
Nice to have:AI tooling / automation

Benefits

  • Not specified in description
Last updated Sep 3, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Outset

AI-powered user interviews

Outset offers AI-powered user interviews to conduct qualitative research. Traditional surveys are fast but lack depth while live interviews produce high quality data but are slow and expensive. Outset uses LLMs to lead interviews and synthesize results so researchers get high quality data 100 times faster.

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