StrategicProjectsLead

Who we are and what we do Contra Labs is a human-centered research lab focused on understanding how creatives use AI, how AI tools can better align with creative needs, and how to preserve the diversity and originality that defines great creative work in an era of increasing homogenization. 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 AI models and applications. Built on top of Contra, the professional network for independent creatives, Contra Labs turns human judgment into the training and evaluation layer that helps AI tools better serve the people who use them. Creatives are at the center of everything we do. Why this role exists Contra Labs is scaling across client engagements including post-training dataset creation, benchmarking programs, and ongoing evaluation partnerships. We need someone who can own the research and delivery side of this work end-to-end. Projects span AI labs, creative tool companies, and research teams, each with different requirements, timelines, and quality bars. This person scopes the methodology, designs the evaluation protocols, spins up the right evaluators, manages quality throughout, and makes sure we deliver rigorous, actionable results. What you'll do - Design and lead research studies including annotation protocols, rubrics, and evaluation methodologies for creative and multimodal outputs - Conduct and oversee qualitative and quantitative analysis, synthesizing findings into actionable insights and recommendations for clients - Interface with creative domain experts, manage evaluator teams, and calibrate for consistent quality through real-time course-correction - Develop and standardize annotation, data quality, and inter-rater reliability protocols across projects - Communi