Strategic Project Lead

About the role

Who we are Contra Labs is a human-centered research lab studying how creatives actually use AI, how tools can serve creative work better, and how to protect the originality that gets flattened as everything starts to look the same. We connect a global network of top creative talent with frontier AI labs and product companies. By grounding our research in real creative workflows, we help define what "good" looks like across design, video, imagery, and beyond. Our work powers benchmarking, evaluation, and post-training for leading models and applications. Built on Contra, the professional network for independent creatives, we turn human judgment into the training and evaluation layer that helps these tools serve the people who use them. Why this role exists We are scaling across client engagements: post-training dataset creation, benchmarking programs, and ongoing evaluation partnerships. Each project spans a different mix of AI labs, creative-tool companies, and research teams, with different requirements, timelines, and quality bars. We need someone to own this work from end to end. Think of yourself as the operator for a project or vertical. You sit between three groups that do no