---
title: 'Deployment Lead at Labelbox'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/deployment-lead-labelbox-san-francisco-na902x0e4rs1'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Deployment Lead at Labelbox

- **Company:** Labelbox
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $200k–$230k
- **Posted:** 2026-06-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/labelbox/jobs/5158994007

## Job description

Shape the Future of AI

At Labelbox, we're building the critical infrastructure that powers breakthrough AI models at leading research labs and enterprises. Since 2018, we've been pioneering data-centric approaches that are fundamental to AI development, and our work becomes even more essential as AI capabilities expand exponentially.

## About Labelbox

We're the only company offering three integrated solutions for frontier AI development:

- Enterprise Platform & Tools: Advanced annotation tools, workflow automation, and quality control systems that enable teams to produce high-quality training data at scale
- Frontier Data Labeling Service: Specialized data labeling through Alignerr, leveraging subject matter experts for next-generation AI models
- Expert Marketplace: Connecting AI teams with highly skilled annotators and domain experts for flexible scaling

## Why Join Us

- High-Impact Environment: We operate like an early-stage startup, focusing on impact over process. You'll take on expanded responsibilities quickly, with career growth directly tied to your contributions.
- Technical Excellence: Work at the cutting edge of AI development, collaborating with industry leaders and shaping the future of artificial intelligence.
- Innovation at Speed: We celebrate those who take ownership, move fast, and deliver impact. Our environment rewards high agency and rapid execution.
- Continuous Growth: Every role requires continuous learning and evolution. You'll be surrounded by curious minds solving complex problems at the frontier of AI.
- Clear Ownership: You'll know exactly what you're responsible for and have the autonomy to execute. We empower people to drive results through clear ownership and metrics.

## Role Overview

## About the Role

The Deployment Lead owns the successful delivery of complex customer programs from initial scoping through steady-state execution — on time, to the quality bar, and at margin. This is a senior, customer-facing role for operators who can translate a customer's technical and business requirements into clear execution plans, coordinate multiple internal workstreams, own the economics of the deployment, and ensure projects meet their throughput, quality, delivery, and margin commitments.

Deployment Leads sit at the intersection of customer relationship management, technical program management, and operational and financial execution. They must understand the underlying technical requirements of each program well enough to pressure-test implementation plans and communicate tradeoffs clearly with the customer — and own the unit economics well enough to protect margin while they do it.

The Deployment Lead is the operations-and-margin leg of the customer team: they own delivery and the deployment's economics, partnering with the General Manager, who owns the broader customer relationship and growth. They are the primary point of accountability for the delivery of a major customer or portfolio of projects, and the customer's point of contact when timelines, requirements, or operational performance are in play. They coordinate Technical Program Managers and Forward Deployed Engineers across the account, ensuring each workstream is staffed from the pools, technically sound, and aligned with the broader customer objective.

This role is equivalent in seniority to a TPM Manager, but with a stronger emphasis on customer ownership, deployment success, and margin. It is a senior destination on the TPM track and a pathway toward a General Manager role. General Managers own the broader account end-to-end, including the overall customer and researcher relationships, proposal development, account strategy, operating cadence, and the portfolio of deployments delivered for that customer.

## What You'll Do

- Own the end-to-end deployment of projects for one or more major customers, from initial scoping and technical design through launch and ongoing execution — accountable for throughput, quality, delivery, and margin.
- Own the economics of your deployments: instrument margin live, manage the cost-to-revenue picture across the account's projects, and make the in-flight calls (comp structure, staffing, project structure) that protect it, the level where TPMs escalate margin-structure decisions.
- Serve as the customer's primary point of contact for delivery — timelines, technical requirements, risks, and operational performance.
- Develop a detailed understanding of each customer's technical requirements: system constraints, integrations, data flows, workflows, and acceptance criteria.
- Translate customer requirements into clear project plans, milestones, owners, success metrics, and a margin model.
- Ensure the account's projects move through their gates — calibration before scaling, staged ramp, delivery acceptance — so quality and margin hold across the portfolio.
- Work closely with FDEs, TPMs, and FDRs to validate implementation plans, manage dependencies, and ensure technical decisions support the customer's goals and the deployment's economics.
- Coordinate TPMs and FDEs across multiple concurrent projects, maintaining a clear view of progress, staffing, risk, margin, and cross-project dependencies — and ensure projects are staffed from the pools and the data-trainer workforce is sized and productive via TPMs and Pod Leads.
- Communicate technical and economic tradeoffs and implementation risks clearly to customer stakeholders and internal teams.
- Identify risks early, establish mitigation plans, and escalate when timelines, technical feasibility, quality, or margin are at risk.
- Partner with FDEs, FDRs, the Talent/Crowd team, the GM, and platform teams to unblock execution.
- Establish the operating cadence, dashboards, and escalation paths that create visibility and accountability — and improve deployment playbooks as the organization scales.

## What You'll Own

- Delivery of your customer's portfolio — on time, to the quality bar, and at or above target margin.
- The deployment's economics: live margin, the cost-to-revenue picture, and the in-flight decisions that protect it.
- The customer's trust on delivery and operational performance.
- A clear operating cadence and a live view of progress, staffing, risk, and margin across projects.

## What We're Looking For

- Significant experience owning complex, cross-functional programs in a customer-facing environment — as an operator who has run things, not advised on them.
- Financial and commercial numeracy: comfort owning margin, building and reading the unit economics of a program, and making the call to protect it.
- Strong technical fluency and the ability to quickly understand complex systems, workflows, and implementation requirements.
- Ability to communicate credibly with technical customer stakeholders while translating technical detail into clear decisions for non-technical audiences.
- A track record of partnering effectively with engineers, program managers, and cross-functional operators.
- Excellent judgment: you can distinguish technical issues from execution issues from customer-management issues, and find the right path to resolution.
- A strong track record of delivering against ambitious timelines while holding a high bar for quality.
- Comfort operating in ambiguous environments where requirements evolve and processes are still being built.
- Strong operational instincts, a bias toward action, and attention to detail across multiple projects at once.

## Nice to Have

- Background in consulting, banking, private equity/VC, or an operating role where you owned a P&L or a hard number.
- Experience deploying technical products, services, or data-intensive programs.
- Familiarity with AI, machine learning, data pipelines, or RL/evaluation work.
- Experience working directly with forward-deployed engineers, solutions engineers, or implementation teams.
- Experience managing strategic accounts with multiple parallel workstreams.
- Experience building repeatable operating systems for a rapidly scaling organization.

What Success Looks Like

In your first several months, you'll take ownership of a major customer deployment, develop a strong understanding of its technical and operational requirements, stand up a clear operating cadence, and bring real visibility to delivery risk and margin. You'll build strong working relationships with the TPM, FDE, and FDR teams and the GM, keep the technical and operational workstreams coordinated, hold your projects to their gates, and become the customer's trusted point of contact when implementation decisions, timelines, or margins are at risk.

Over time, you'll help define how the organization deploys complex technical programs at scale. Labelbox strives to ensure pay parity across the organization and discuss compensation transparently.  The expected annual base salary range for United States-based candidates is below. This range is not inclusive of any potential equity packages or additional benefits. Exact compensation varies based on a variety of factors, including skills and competencies, experience, and geographical location.

Annual base salary range $200,000—$230,000 USD

Life at Labelbox

- Environment: Fast-paced and high-intensity, perfect for ambitious individuals who thrive on ownership and quick decision-making
- Growth: Career advancement opportunities directly tied to your impact
- Vision: Be part of building the foundation for humanity's most transformative technology

Our Vision

We believe data will remain crucial in achieving artificial general intelligence. As AI models become more sophisticated, the need for high-quality, specialized training data will only grow. Join us in developing new products and services that enable the next generation of AI breakthroughs.

Labelbox is backed by leading investors including SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz, B Capital, Gradient Ventures, Databricks Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins. Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and leading AI labs.

Your Personal Data Privacy: Any personal information you provide Labelbox as a part of your application will be processed in accordance with Labelbox’s [Job Applicant Privacy notice](https://docs.labelbox.com/page/job-applicant-privacy-notice).

Any emails from Labelbox team members will originate from a @labelbox.com email address. If you encounter anything that raises suspicions during your interactions, we encourage you to exercise caution and suspend or discontinue communications.

## About Labelbox

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Labelbox builds the data engine for frontier AI, producing environments, expert signals, and platforms that leading AI labs and enterprises use to train, evaluate, and deploy reinforcement learning (RL) models.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Funding stage: $189M total funding to date)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (Mission District)
- **Founded**: 2018
- **Founders**: Manu Sharma (CEO) – other co-founders not publicly named in available sources.

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence – data infrastructure for RL and frontier model training.
- **Target customers**: B2B – frontier AI labs (partnering with over 90% of leading U.S. AI labs) and enterprise teams building specialist AI agents.
- **Mission**: "Turn human knowledge into compounding intelligence, making the learning loop the foundation of an AI team’s competitive advantage."

## Products & Services
- **Recursion** – RL platform for enterprise specialist models. Integrates enterprise APIs, SaaS tools, databases into simulation environments; enables scenario generation, RL training, evaluation, and deployment.
- **Horizon** – RL environments and evaluations for post-training, covering reasoning, tool use, and computer use across autonomous AI research, agent coding, scientific knowledge work, and cybersecurity.
- **Alignerr** – Expert network of 2.6M+ knowledge contributors across 200+ domains, providing human preference signals and reward data for frontier models.
- **Terra** – Full-stack data products for robotics foundation models (video, trajectories, multimodal annotations) collected with purpose-built hardware and AI-powered diversity engines.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: $189M in total funding to date (as of mid-2026).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not explicitly listed in available sources; partners include "over 90% of leading AI labs in the U.S." and Meta (case study on GIM benchmark).
- **Growth Signals**:  
  - 2.6M+ Alignerr network across 40+ countries.  
  - Published a benchmark with Meta (GIM-615) for evaluating frontier AI reasoning.  
  - Growing headcount: 13 open roles listed on Greenhouse (Applied Research, Engineering, Alignerr Services, Sales).  
  - Expanding from annotation into full RL data engine (Recursion, Horizon, Terra).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unique data engine for RL**: Combines expert human signals (Alignerr) with simulated environments (Recursion, Horizon) and robotics data (Terra) – a full stack for reinforcement learning that few competitors offer.
- **Deep partnerships**: Collaborates with leading U.S. AI labs, providing a strong network effect.
- **Proven research output**: Co-developed the GIM benchmark with Meta, demonstrating credibility in frontier evaluation.
- **Enterprise focus**: Helps companies turn proprietary workflows into training data for specialist models that outperform general LLMs on narrow tasks at lower cost.

## Strategic Focus
- Doubling down on reinforcement learning data infrastructure: building environments, reward signals, and evaluation tools for post-training and agentic AI.
- Scaling the Alignerr expert network to cover more domains and languages.
- Expanding enterprise adoption of Recursion to convert proprietary workflows into production-grade specialist models.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: "Operate like an early-stage startup, even at our current stage." Fast-paced, high-intensity, high individual ownership, impact over process.
- **Location**: HQ in San Francisco’s Mission District – "heart of the AI boom."
- **Remote/Hybrid**: Roles listed as "San Francisco Bay Area" – likely office-first with some flexibility (not explicitly stated as remote).
- **Perks**: Unlimited PTO, $150/month WFH stipend, $1k annual education stipend, annual travel stipend, paid family leave, medical/dental/vision, HSA/FSA, 401(k) management, employee-paid life & disability.
- **Growth**: "Take on expanded responsibilities quickly; career growth tied to impact." Opportunity to work at the cutting edge of AI development with industry leaders.
- **Engineering culture**: Emphasis on technical excellence, rapid execution, and solving complex problems in frontier AI.

## Sources
1. [labelbox.com](https://labelbox.com/) – Company homepage, product descriptions, partnership stats.
2. [labelbox.com/company/about/](https://labelbox.com/company/about/) – About page, mission, funding, team, perks.
3. [labelbox.com/company/careers/](https://labelbox.com/company/careers/) – Careers page, work environment, benefits, values.
4. [job-boards.greenhouse.io/labelbox](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/labelbox) – Current open roles and locations.

## Other roles at Labelbox

- [Accounts Payable, Spend Management Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/accounts-payable-spend-management-coordinator-labelbox-india-6ev3gkwk5nsb) — India
- [Global Specialized Domain Expert Recruiter (Contractor)](https://feeny.ai/job/global-specialized-domain-expert-recruiter-contractor-labelbox-united-states-cggdd2bjm5x0) — United States
- [Staff ML Engineer, Agent Training & Environments](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-ml-engineer-agent-training-environments-labelbox-san-francisco-61fyf5x8bnnw) — San Francisco, CA
- [Cyber Security Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/cyber-security-intern-labelbox-san-francisco-81atck2vj8rq) — San Francisco, CA
- [Targeted Recruiting & Onboarding Specialist (Contractor)](https://feeny.ai/job/targeted-recruiting-onboarding-specialist-contractor-labelbox-india-p380f0dmy14b) — India
- [Staff Software Engineer, AI Data Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-ai-data-platform-labelbox-san-francisco-6tgah5atnmsm) — San Francisco, CA
- [Forward Deployed Engineering Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineering-manager-labelbox-san-francisco-pxxp75hvtt47) — San Francisco, CA
- [Forward Deployed Research Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-research-scientist-labelbox-san-francisco-x2c58bs8fmmm) — San Francisco, CA
- [Forward Deployed Engineer, RL Environments](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-rl-environments-labelbox-san-francisco-s4zt23ad43kc) — San Francisco, CA
- [Deployment Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/deployment-lead-accenture-federal-services-hanover-pb2gypas219q) — Hanover, MD