Program Manager - Research Operations

Participant recruitment at Outset spans a global partner network, internal process, and the product experience itself - and this role owns all three. Rather than running recruitment study by study, you'll build the system that makes it predictable at scale. You'll be Outset's authority on recruitment: the connective tissue between our partners, our teams, and our product. Responsibilities • Own partner performance and communication, with a system to assess and continually optimize each partner's quality, reliability, and best-fit use cases. • Negotiate preferred rates and commercial terms, and build the feasibility process (incidence rates, targeting, which vendor for which use case) that keeps recruitment predictable as volume grows. • Design and document the end-to-end recruitment process, from intake through delivery - with fill-time benchmarks by audience/screening criteria and a clear playbook for tracking and escalating at-risk projects. • Build the internal enablement and training that gets the GTM team up to speed and confident in how recruitment works. • Partner with Product and Engineering on the recruitment experience - fraud detection, identity verification, quality flagging, refunds - bringing structured, evidence-backed problems into the product roadmap. • Identify and spec internal tooling that reduces manual ops work. • Translate how recruitment works into content for two audiences: best-practice guidance for Account Directors/AEs, and customer-facing explanations of our role, our partners' role, and what to expect. Qualifications • 5-10 years in research operations, participant recruitment, or panel/vendor management, with deep expertise in digital qualitative recruitment; experience with quantitative recruitment is a plus • Hands-on understanding of how participant recruitment actually works: panels and marketplaces, screeners, incidence and feasibility, soft launches, quotas, incentives, fraud, and quality control. • Track record managing vendors and partners - selecting, negotiating, holding accountable, managing spend. • Genuine program management ability - you can hold a messy, cross-functional problem in your head, sequence it, and drive it to a working system. • Experience at both a large organization and a startup. We want the enterprise process instincts and the scrappiness to build fast without waiting for permission. • Strong communicator - able to distill complex, cross-functional information into clear training, documentation, playbooks, and customer-facing content. • Comfortable with AI tooling for content and automation; experience building AI tooling/dashboards a plus. • Highly independent - this role is built for someone who defines priorities as much as executes them. • Bonus: experience at a research platform, panel provider, or research agency.