Director, Strategic Product Operations

Morpheus are partnered with a seed-stage AI startup building the data and infrastructure layer for taste.

About the company

This company is building the data and infrastructure layer for taste, with a mission to end AI slop and make AI feel right, not just be correct. Backed by tier 1 VCs, most frontier labs are already customers. AI has nailed objective domains and can generate almost anything now. The hard part left is judgement: what fits, what feels like you, what is actually great. This company is turning that into something measurable, starting with design, building the post-training data and RL environments that teach taste to frontier models, plus the context and verification tools agents need to produce work that's more creative, more on-brand, and more right.

About the role

Taste is the ability to recognise quality and explain why. This team teaches AI models what great looks like in subjective domains. You don't have to be a designer, but you do need strong opinions about quality in something, and the ability to back them up.

What you'd own

You'll be the DRI of data development projects and the manager of the team that delivers them: a small team of project managers and operations leads. You'll own projects end to end through them, from scoping and research to expert staffing, quality routing, partner delivery, scope management, and margin. You'll manage a group who are the connective tissue between three groups that don't naturally talk to each other: the lab researcher who needs the data, the experts producing it, and the internal engineering team building the infrastructure. Your job is to make all three feel like they're working on the same thing and ensuring everything is on track.

Day to day operations

• Operate as a hybrid operations, product, and people manager, essentially the mini-CEO of a growing vertical
• Hire, onboard, and develop a team of project and operations leads, setting the standard for how they run their own projects
• Work directly with researchers at frontier labs and internal researchers/designers to scope new projects and evals, then delegate and coach your team through execution
• Own the relationship and roadmap of the internal engineering team, shaping what tooling gets built
• Own quality and project health across your team's projects, with the resources and levers to fix anything that feels off
• Run regular 1:1s, set goals, and give direct feedback to your reports

Who they're looking for

• Somewhat technical: you live in Claude Code and find research papers genuinely interesting
• Experienced managing people, not just projects: you've hired, coached, and held others accountable to a high bar
• Great at turning processes into efficient, clear, measurable machines
• Drawn to ambiguous, difficult problems, and comfortable bringing a team along without a perfect brief
• Skilled at influencing people with and without formal authority
• Meticulous and detail-oriented, with a high bar for quality