Strategic Product Operations Lead

About the company
Taste Labs is building the data and infrastructure layer for taste.
Our goal is to end AI slop. To make AI feel right, not just be correct. We raised $18.5M in seed co-led by Amplify and CRV, and most frontier labs are already customers.
AI has nailed objective domains and can generate anything. The hard part left is judgement: what fits, what feels like you, what's actually GREAT. We're turning that into something measurable, starting with design.
We do it on two sides: building the post-training data and RL environments that teach taste to frontier models, and the context and verification tools agents need to produce work that's more creative, more on-brand, more right.
If that problem excites you, you'll like it here!

About the role
We’re hiring a Strategic Product Operations Lead to partner directly with Thais on running the business: customer projects, team coordination, hiring ops, investor comms — the cross-functional connective tissue that lets us move fast without things falling apart.

This is a hybrid role. Think: part Chief of Staff, part Head of Ops, part PM — someone who can hold a strategy conversation with customers in the morning, operationalize a new hiring process in the afternoon, and prep an investor update in the evening. You’ll work closely with Matthew (our first PO Lead, who joined recently to scale this function).
What you'll work on

• Customer + project ops: scoping, timelines, QA, delivery for partners like Anthropic, Flint, and others

• Hiring ops: keeping Ashby clean, managing recruiter relationships, running searches end-to-end

• Investor + board ops: prepping updates, tracking KPIs, managing cadence

• Internal ops: tools, dashboards, payroll, vendor management

• Whatever else needs to get done — you’re the person who notices the gap and closes it

You might be a fit if

• 5+ years in BizOps, Strategy, Consulting (top-tier), or a founding/early Chief of Staff role at a fast-moving startup

• Experience designing and running human-data / AI training pipelines is a big plus (Mercor, Scale, Invisible, frontier labs)

• You’re obsessive about process without being bureaucratic

• You’re great at writing, at pulling a deck together fast, and at running a tough customer conversation

• You have design/creative taste — you care how things look, not just that they work

Not a fit if

• You want a narrow PM role with a clear backlog

• You don’t enjoy switching contexts quickly

• You’d be uncomfortable with ambiguity