Lead, Data Quality – Partnerships

Figure, an AI robotics company headquartered in San Jose, California, seeks a Lead, Data Quality - Partnerships to oversee our external data vendor ecosystem and uphold rigorous quality standards across our training operations. This full-time role places you at the center of scaling our data foundation as we develop humanoid robots capable of human-level intelligence.

Role Overview

The data quality infrastructure supporting our robotics systems depends on world-class annotation and review partners. In this role, you will be the senior steward of Figure's external data labeling and review vendor relationships—responsible for who we partner with, what standards they meet, and how their output maintains parity with our internal teams. You'll own the complete lifecycle of vendor management, from initial sourcing and selection through performance monitoring and offboarding. When projects transition to external vendors, you become the primary owner directing all delivery, with Project Coordinators executing the work under your oversight.

Core Duties

• Source, evaluate, onboard, and manage a portfolio of external data labeling and review vendors.
• Negotiate statements of work, pricing, capacity terms, and contracts; track budgets and manage surge resources across partners.
• Establish and monitor service level agreements and quality acceptance criteria for every external vendor, holding them to the same standards as our in-house operations.
• Develop and maintain vendor performance metrics, including throughput, quality scores, inter-rater reliability, and SLA compliance tracked in regular business reviews.
• Design and run calibration exercises and golden set validation with vendors to ensure their output aligns with internal benchmarks.
• Work with engineering and ML teams to translate technical data quality requirements into clear, executable operational guidelines and specifications.
• Plan and coordinate vendor capacity ramps to meet project timelines, including growth into new geographic regions and burst capacity scenarios.
• Lead coordination between internal Project Coordinators and leadership on vendor assignments and project transitions.

Who We're Looking For

• 6+ years of hands-on experience in data quality, labeling operations, vendor management, or ML data pipeline operations, with demonstrated end-to-end ownership of significant vendor relationships.
• Proven track record sourcing, contracting, and managing external data vendors; experience defining and enforcing service level agreements is essential.
• Strong background negotiating commercial agreements—pricing, statements of work, capacity agreements—and running vendor partnership reviews.
• Direct experience establishing quality standards, acceptance criteria, and audit processes that third-party teams executed to specification.
• Ability to collaborate with technical stakeholders and translate engineering and ML requirements into operational procedures for external teams.
• Leadership capability across both direct reports and matrixed relationships, including coordinators managing external vendor work.
• Bonus: experience scaling multi-vendor operations across regions, designing ground truth datasets, background in robotics or physical AI systems, or establishing vendor operations in emerging markets.

More About Figure

Figure is building autonomous humanoid robots designed to perform diverse tasks in residential and commercial environments. Our mission is to advance AI robotics to the point where our systems possess human-level reasoning and physical capability. The data quality organization is foundational to this mission, ensuring the training data that powers our AI meets the highest standards. We're headquartered in San Jose, California.

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