[Hiring] Strategic Sourcing Lead @Appen

Role Description

As a Strategic Sourcing Lead, you’ll lead a new global sourcing hub focused on finding the right contributors for complex AI projects that require specialized or hard-to-reach talent across a wide range of domains, from translation and localization to legal, medical, scientific, and technical fields. This is a strategic, hands-on role within Fulfillment. You’ll define how the hub operates, develop the team, and partner with Recruitment and Delivery to build sourcing strategies ranging from complex searches to high-volume scaling. The team will work in a data-informed and AI-enabled environment, using technology to enhance research, outreach, analysis, and sourcing efficiency.

Your Impact

• Design and execute creative sourcing strategies for specialized, hard-to-reach, and high-volume needs.
• Partner with Recruitment and Delivery to assess requirements, sourcing feasibility, and project needs.
• Build relationships with production stakeholders and communicate risks, timelines, and expectations.
• Use sourcing and conversion data to identify bottlenecks, test approaches, and improve funnel performance.
• Embed AI and automation into sourcing workflows to improve research, outreach, analysis, efficiency, and scalability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in sourcing, recruitment, talent acquisition, or a related field.
• Experience leading or mentoring sourcing teams in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong stakeholder management, communication, and influencing skills across teams.
• Strong analytical skills and the ability to use data to guide sourcing decisions.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.

Requirements

• Experience sourcing for AI, data, or crowdsourcing projects.
• Experience sourcing linguists, translators, or other language profiles across markets.
• Experience working with global or distributed teams across time zones.
• Flexibility to work regular U.S. hours or provide U.S. overlap when working in a different time zone.

Benefits

• Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence.
• Value curiosity, accountability, and a commitment to delivering the highest quality AI solutions.
• Work on complex challenges that shape the future of AI across industries and geographies.
• Flexibility to deliver in a way that works for you and your team.
• Access to tools, resources, and development opportunities to continue building your capability over time.

Company Description

Appen has been a leader in AI training data for over 30 years. We specialize in human-generated data to train, fine-tune, and evaluate models across generative AI, large language models, computer vision, and speech recognition. Our AI-assisted data annotation platform and global crowd of more than 1 million contributors in over 200 countries support model pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, evaluation and benchmarking, safety and red teaming, and multilingual global expansion.