Strategic Project Lead (SPL)

About Drafted

Drafted connects university students to frontier AI labs for data annotation and model training. The thesis is simple: there are over 20 million undergraduates worldwide who represent an untapped middle layer between low-quality, inconsistent gig workers and expensive, hard-to-scale expert contractors. Drafted recruits, trains, and quality-scores that talent pool, then routes it to the labs and enterprises building frontier AI systems.

About The Role

Foundational model companies and AI labs partner with Drafted to scale high-quality data annotation and evaluation operations built on university talent. As an SPL, you will drive the tactical execution of these partnerships end-to-end: standing up new engagements, orchestrating the student contributors who do the work, and owning the relationship with the lab or enterprise on the other side of the contract.

This is a hands-on operations role for someone excited by process optimization, rapid iteration, and high-intensity problem solving, not a strategy, product, or general chief-of-staff role. It is explicitly the kind of seat where you are judged on whether the work shipped on time, at quality, at scale.

This is an early-stage company: a small founding team, a lean but fast-growing contributor base, and a pace of change where the scope of this role will look meaningfully different in six months than it does today. Ownership, judgment under ambiguity, and a willingness to build process rather than wait for it are more important here than prior title or company size. We're an early-stage startup that operates with intensity, which means occasional responsiveness outside standard hours during time-critical contributor pushes, and always holding a high bar for output.

Core Responsibilities

Operational Excellence

• Design and manage end-to-end contributor pipelines, from partner specifications to final delivery

• Diagnose bottlenecks in onboarding, task routing, or quality review, and implement fixes: incentive design, workflow re-sequencing, refined instructions, or scaled review processes

• Own the operational metrics behind Drafted's quality claims, including performance against benchmark suites like ToolBench, HarmBench, OSWorld, PRM800K, and Global MMLU

Client Relationships

• Act as the primary point of contact for assigned AI lab or enterprise partners

• Deliver clear, consistent reporting and proactively flag risks before partners have to ask

• Identify expansion opportunities within existing accounts as partners scale their usage

Large-Scale Coordination

• Source, vet, train, and performance-manage cohorts of student contributors drawn from Drafted's university partnerships (USC, UChicago, Georgetown, University of Miami, and beyond)

• Maintain execution standards across onboarding, active production, and quality review as the contributor base scales past its current 15,000+

Reporting Cadence

• Run regular internal syncs to stay ahead of issues before they affect a partner deliverable

• Provide transparent, recurring progress updates to both partners and the founders

What Success Looks Like

• First 30 days: ramped on the contributor pipeline, the partner landscape, and the quality-scoring methodology; running at least one workstream independently

• First 90 days: owning one or more partner relationships end-to-end and able to diagnose and fix pipeline issues without founder involvement

• First 6 months: trusted with the highest-stakes, most time-critical partner engagements as they come in

What We're Looking For

Must-Haves

• Background in consulting, finance, startup operations, or another operationally intense environment; candidates with direct experience as an SPL (or equivalent operations role) at Mercor or a comparable frontier AI data/talent marketplace are strongly preferred

• Strong analytical and communication skills, with a proven track record of managing complex, deadline-driven projects

• Comfortable working directly with high-profile, technical clients (AI lab researchers and eval teams)

• Genuine excitement for gritty process optimization and large-scale execution, not just planning

Strong Nice-to-Haves

• Experience managing large, distributed contributor or contractor populations (1,000+) in tools like Slack

• Prior exposure to university partnerships or higher-ed institutional relationships

• Comfort with data: pulling and interpreting pipeline metrics well enough to know when something looks wrong

Growth Path

SPLs start as individual contributors running partner engagements end-to-end. High performers grow into ownership of multiple concurrent partner relationships and, as the team expands, may lead a team of SPLs.

Compensation & Benefits

$120,000–$130,000 base, commensurate with experience, plus a performance bonus tied to partner delivery and pipeline outcomes.

• Meaningful equity in an early-stage company with outsized upside

• Health, dental, and vision coverage

• Direct, regular access to the founding team; no layers between you and the decisions that matter

• A fast-moving environment where scope expands quickly for people who earn it

• Flexible working location, with a strong preference for candidates who can work closely with the founding team in person on a regular basis

Interview Process

• Intro call with the founding team (30 min): mutual fit, background, motivation

• Case-style working session (60–90 min): a real, current Drafted problem you'd scope and present a plan against

• Founder panel: cross-functional fit and communication style

• Reference calls

• Offer

drafted is a proud equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fair hiring practices and to creating a welcoming environment for all team members. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, familial status or veteran status.