Head of Technical Operations, AI/ML Delivery (Law)

About the role

Innodata builds and delivers AI/ML programs for some of the most demanding clients in the market, spanning model development, training and fine-tuning, LLM-based solutions, data pipelines and model evaluation. The Head of Technical Delivery and Operations for the law domain owns that portfolio end to end. You are accountable for keeping what each client expects and what actually gets delivered tightly aligned, and for surfacing risk early enough that it can still be solved rather than explained.

Law work does not behave like the rest of the portfolio. It is delivered by a legally qualified workforce, judged against standards of defensibility rather than throughput alone, and scrutinized by client counsel who will test your reasoning rather than your dashboard. Footing in the law therefore matters in this role.

This is a technical leadership role, not an administrative one. You own senior client relationships up to CXO and general counsel level, you lead the delivery managers running individual law engagements, and you connect practice heads, engineering, talent acquisition and operations around one plan. You are also expected to stay close enough to the work to read the review protocol, interrogate the quality data, challenge an estimate and take a problem apart yourself when a program needs it.

What you will own

Portfolio and delivery ownership

• Own the end-to-end delivery roadmap for the law portfolio, including annotation, review, extraction and model evaluation workstreams
• Translate client requirements and business goals into structured delivery plans, milestones and success metrics that your delivery managers can execute against
• Hold scope, timelines, budgets and resourcing across concurrent law engagements, and intervene where slippage threatens a client commitment
• Set and enforce the governance cadence across all active engagements, including status reviews, steering committee updates and sprint or iteration reviews

Law domain governance

• Own law taxonomies, review protocols and evaluation rubrics across the portfolio, and challenge them where they do not hold up against how the law is actually applied
• Set the quality standard across relevance, issue coding, clause and obligation extraction and legal reasoning assessment, and decide where a matter needs its own approach rather than the house method
• Own adjudication of escalated law calls, working with qualified counsel where the judgment sits beyond your own footing, and build the calibration practices that keep a qualified reviewer population consistent
• Keep client counsel aligned on standards, sampling and defensibility, and stand behind the methodology when it is questioned
• Hold the line on privilege, confidentiality and data handling obligations across every engagement

Technical ownership and depth

• Read and challenge project guidelines, annotation taxonomies, evaluation rubrics and workflow designs rather than routing every technical question to the practice teams
• Interrogate delivery and quality data directly instead of relying on summarized reporting, and build or modify the trackers and working tools a program needs
• Work with practice and technical leads to validate solution approaches, technical feasibility and effort estimates before commitments are made to clients
• Get into the detail with engineers and data scientists when a program is off track, and set the technical standard your delivery managers are held to

Client and executive relationships

• Own the senior client relationship across the law portfolio, working with stakeholders from day-to-day contacts through to general counsel and CXO level
• Lead business reviews and escalation calls, presenting delivery status, risks and outcomes with a clear point of view
• Capture, document and continuously validate client expectations against what is actually being built, closing gaps before they surface as dissatisfaction
• Build trusted adviser relationships that support account growth and renewal

Team and cross-functional leadership

• Lead the delivery managers running individual law engagements, set the delivery standard for the portfolio and develop the capability of the team behind it
• Act as the connective tissue between practice heads, engineering, talent acquisition and operations so that everyone is working off the same delivery plan and priorities
• Coordinate staffing and hiring pipelines with talent acquisition, including the legally qualified reviewer population the portfolio depends on
• Partner with operations on resourcing, utilization, invoicing and billing milestones and contractual compliance

Risk, quality and governance

• Identify delivery risks across technical, resourcing, scope and timeline dimensions early, and drive mitigation before they escalate
• Anticipate client concerns from program signals such as slipping milestones, quality drift or resourcing gaps, and act ahead of formal escalation
• Own issue and escalation management end to end, coordinating the right internal teams and communicating transparently with the client throughout
• Maintain accurate, real-time visibility into portfolio health, present executive dashboards and reviews, and ensure contractual SLAs, deliverable timelines and commercial commitments are tracked and met
• Drive continuous improvement in delivery processes, templates and playbooks based on lessons learned across engagements

What you bring

Education

• Bachelor's degree required, through either route. Either a law degree, meaning an LLB, JD or equivalent, or a degree in engineering, computer science or a closely related technical discipline
• Both is the strongest profile. Candidates who hold a law degree alongside a technical qualification are preferred
• Whichever route you enter through, the other side has to show in your record. Candidates entering on the law degree must evidence technical working capability in their delivery history. Candidates entering on the technical degree must evidence substantive law delivery ownership. Both are tested at interview
• Postgraduate study welcome. An LLM, MBA or equivalent is an advantage but not required where delivery experience compensates

Experience

• 10+ years in technical program or delivery management, law operations leadership, or a combination of law practice and delivery leadership
• 3+ years specifically managing AI/ML, data science or data engineering programs
• Law delivery at scale. Owned law review, contract analysis, eDiscovery or regulatory delivery through a qualified reviewer population. This is required of every candidate regardless of degree route
• People leadership. Experience leading delivery managers, program managers or senior individual contributors, with accountability for their output and development
• Executive client ownership. Demonstrated experience as the senior client-facing owner for enterprise, general counsel or CXO-level stakeholders, including escalations and commercial conversations
• Portfolio scale. Proven ability to run multiple cross-functional programs at once in a matrixed environment spanning engineering, practice teams, hiring and operations
• Services delivery model. Experience in IT services, law process outsourcing, consulting or an AI/ML solutions provider, where delivery is to a client rather than to an internal team, is preferred

Certifications

• Preferred: PMP, PgMP or PRINCE2; or Lean Six Sigma Green Belt or higher
• Also valued: a cloud or MLOps certification from AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, or an eDiscovery credential such as CEDS

Technical skills

• AI/ML lifecycle. Strong working knowledge of model training and fine-tuning, LLM-based solution delivery, model evaluation and MLOps concepts
• Personal technical working capability. Able to read and challenge guidelines and workflow designs, interrogate delivery and quality data directly, build or modify trackers and utilities, and troubleshoot technical issues alongside engineers rather than delegating every technical decision
• Law task fluency. Comfortable with law taxonomies, issue coding, clause and obligation extraction, privilege and relevance review, and review quality control practices
• Quality method. Comfortable with rubric design, calibration, inter-rater agreement and adjudication as instruments of delivery quality, not just as reporting
• Executive communication. Able to translate technical detail into business impact and present credibly to counsel and CXO audiences

How you work

• Orchestrator who stays in the detail. You connect client, engineering, hiring and operations, and remain close enough to the technical work to test assumptions, spot a flawed estimate and take a problem apart personally
• Credible on the law. You can defend a review methodology to client counsel on its merits, not just on its metrics
• Proactive rather than reactive. You anticipate risks, resourcing gaps and client concerns before they surface as problems
• Ownership-driven. You treat client outcomes and portfolio health as personally accountable, end to end
• Comfortable operating on fixed governance cadences, with no tolerance for missed or inaccurate deliverables

Innodata is an equal opportunity employer. We hire on merit and potential, and we consider every qualified applicant without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, civil status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Inclusion at Innodata is governed by policy and carried by people. Our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Policy sets the standard, and our employee resource groups translate it into practice. Parents at Work supports colleagues balancing caregiving with career.

We provide reasonable accommodation at every stage of the hiring process and in the role itself. If you need an adjustment to apply, to complete an assessment, or to interview, let your recruiter know.