About Cethos
Cethos is a Calgary, Canada-based life-sciences language company specializing in linguistic validation, Clinical Outcome Assessments (COA/eCOA), cognitive debriefing, and clinician review, alongside certified translation in 200+ languages. We help CROs, pharma, biotech, medical device companies, and eCOA platform vendors run submission-ready, ISPOR-aligned translation and validation programs across global clinical trials.
The Role
You'll be our first dedicated operations leader, fully remote, owning delivery end to end: every project that comes in — linguistic validation, cognitive debriefing, clinician review, certified translation — leaves on time, on quality, and on margin. Today that machinery is run day-to-day by the founders; your job is to take it over, systematize it, and build the team that scales it. It's a hands-on leadership role for someone who has run production at a language service provider, BPO, or clinical-services company and wants real ownership of how an operation grows.
This role works North American (Mountain Time) business hours, Monday to Friday — roughly 9am–5pm MT — so you can work directly with our Calgary-based leadership and our US and European clients. From the Philippines this is an overnight schedule, so genuine comfort with it is essential.
What You'll Do
- Own delivery across all service lines: intake, scheduling, resourcing, quality gates, and on-time handoff to clients, across concurrent multi-language projects.
- Lead and grow the operations team — project managers and coordinators across time zones — including hiring, training, and performance.
- Define and track the numbers that matter: on-time delivery, turnaround times, gross margin per project, rework rates, and client escalations.
- Own the operating system: workflows in our in-house project portal, automation of repetitive steps, and clear escalation paths for at-risk projects.
- Own quality in practice — QA gates for cognitive debriefing and clinician review reports, corrective actions run to closure, and audit-ready documentation aligned with ISPOR good practices and our ISO 17100 certification program.
- Plan vendor capacity with our vendor management function so the linguist, interviewer, and clinician network is ahead of the pipeline.
- Partner with business development on scoping and capacity, so every commitment we sell is one we can deliver.
What You Need
- 5+ years in operations or production at a language service provider, BPO, CRO, or comparable deadline-driven professional-services environment, including 2+ years leading a team.
- Hands-on familiarity with translation production workflows; direct linguistic validation or COA/clinical translation experience is a strong advantage.
- A builder's track record: processes you created, metrics you moved, teams you grew.
- Comfort managing a distributed team and freelance network across languages and time zones.
- Excellent written and spoken English, and calm, professional communication under deadline pressure.
- Genuine availability during North American (Mountain Time) business hours, Monday to Friday.
- Reliable internet and a quiet workspace; self-directed and dependable in a fully-remote team.
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with ISPOR / ISOQOL good-practice methodology for COA translation and cognitive debriefing.
- Experience preparing for or operating under ISO 17100 or ISO 9001.
- Experience with a TMS or CAT environment (XTM, memoQ, Trados, Phrase, or similar).
- Additional working languages.
What We Offer
- Real scope: the senior delivery seat, reporting directly to the founders, with a mandate to build rather than maintain.
- Meaningful work: the instruments and documents we handle end up in front of patients and regulators in active clinical trials.
- A modern stack: our automation-heavy in-house portal handles the repetitive work, so your team's time goes into judgment, not admin.
- Fully remote with a stable, predictable schedule and compensation based on experience.
Full posting and application: https://www.cethos.com/en/careers/head-of-operations-remote
Cethos is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates and are happy to provide accommodation during the recruitment process on request.
