Director of Quality

About LILT

AI is changing how the world communicates — and LILT is leading that transformation.

We're on a mission to make the world's information accessible to everyone, regardless of the language they speak. We use cutting-edge AI, machine translation, and human-in-the-loop expertise to translate content faster, more accurately, and more cost-effectively without compromising on brand, voice, or quality.

At LILT, we empower our teammates with leading tools, global collaboration, and growth opportunities to do their best work. Our company virtues—Work together, win together; Find a way or make one; Dance in the customer's shoes; Quicker than they expect; Quality is Job 1—guide everything we do. We are trusted by Intel Corporation, Canva, the United States Department of Defense, the United States Air Force, ASICS, and hundreds of global Enterprises. Backed by Sequoia, Intel Capital, and Redpoint, we’re building a category-defining company in a $50B+ global translation market being redefined by AI.

Location: Remote or hybrid, UK or US Eastern time zone

Team: Production, Quality

Reports to: SVP Operations

Direct reports: Quality Managers, Quality Coordinators

About the role

At LILT, quality is a judgment call. Two expert translations can differ and both be right, and what "good" means depends on each customer's voice, audience and risk. This role is about managing that kind of quality at scale, across AI, language models, and human verification.

As Director of Quality, you will own LILT's quality system end to end: standards, audit, compliance, procedures, continuous improvement, and the roadmap and operation of our Quality Agents. You'll help move Quality from a primarily reactive, execution-led function to a proactive, data-driven partner for customers and internal teams, with quality designed into our AI-native workflows.

You'll be the person who can run a customer audit while simultaneously improving how our AI quality checks perform. As the single Quality partner for Customer Success, Production, Research and Product, you'll turn customer requirements into measurable acceptance criteria, effective controls and better models and workflows. You'll advise customers on the right quality, cost and speed mix, including where automated, agent-verified and human-verified workflows are appropriate, with stronger assurance for high-risk and regulated content.

We're looking for a hands-on Quality leader with a solid grounding in quality management and experience putting AI to work on quality. You'll bring senior expertise in data, AI, customer advisory and process, and make sure quality work prevents recurrence rather than stopping at rework.

You might come from AI training data, legal review, clinical documentation, content moderation or customer experience quality. Localization experience is a bonus, not a requirement. This is a quality leadership role, not a software QA or test engineering role.

What you'll do

Continuous improvement

• Lead structured CI across the Localization business: root cause analysis, corrective and preventive actions, KPI reviews and retrospectives.
• Write and maintain quality guidelines and error typologies, and run regular calibration so reviewers, human and AI, apply them consistently.
• Design sampling plans and quality scorecards that show customers and leadership how good our output really is.
• Own a proactive quality metrics framework that makes errors, customer-reported quality issues, rework and trends visible, and use it to prioritise improvements and demonstrate outcomes.
• Strengthen quality controls across review, delivery and follow-through, including mandatory account-specific checks, intervention on critical findings and clear escalation ownership.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to automate checks and escalation, and verify that corrective actions prevent recurrence rather than ending at rework or ticket closure.

Quality measurement and management

• Own how quality is measured across LILT: scoring methods, quality targets by account and content type, and the data behind them.
• Drive quality management for every programme: set the standard, monitor results against it, and intervene when quality slips.
• Partner with Expert Supply and Ops to embed processes, guidance and quality feedback that maintain a high-quality pipeline of experts. ES&O manages the expert workforce; you give them the quality standards and data to do it well.
• Use quality findings and recurring failure patterns to improve expert qualification, guidance and ongoing quality management.

AI-powered quality

• Define what our Quality Agents should check and how well they must perform. Build agents yourself, with well-defined tools and clear, structured instructions, and partner with Product and Research where deeper engineering or model work is needed.
• Own the roadmap for our Quality Agents as they take on more of the quality workflow.
• Measure agent accuracy against expert human reviewers, and decide where agents can be trusted and where humans stay in the loop, with clear monitoring and escalation paths.
• Drive adoption across teams and show measurable reductions in manual quality effort.

Research and Product partnership

• Work closely with Research and Product on document quality metrics, model improvements, AI review, automated QA and new and emerging AI workflows.
• Design the quality data LILT collects and define the metrics built on it, so quality scores are consistent, trusted and usable for evaluating and improving models.
• Turn quality findings into product requirements, evaluation criteria and continuous feedback loops that improve model and workflow output.
• Act as the voice of quality in roadmap discussions, and help decide where human review, AI review or both are needed.

Audit, compliance and procedure

• Own LILT's approach to internal and external audits, including ISO certification (e.g. ISO 17100, ISO 18587, ISO 9001) and customer audits.
• Plan and run periodic internal audits, manage evidence collection, and track corrective and preventive actions to closure.
• Standardise and maintain SOPs, workflows and quality documentation, and keep them current as AI workflows change how we work.
• Make sure quality processes meet customer, contractual and regulatory requirements.

Customer advisory

• Partner with Customer Success and Delivery to define proactive quality programmes, success metrics and governance for strategic accounts, including AI-forward enterprise and life science / regulatory programmes.
• Translate customer quality requirements into clear pre-delivery acceptance criteria, validation methods and risk-appropriate controls.
• Advise customers on the right quality, cost and speed mix and where automated, agent-verified, human-verified or combined workflows are appropriate.
• Represent LILT's quality function as a credible subject-matter authority in customer business reviews, audits and escalations, using quality data and metrics to demonstrate fitness for purpose.

Team leadership

• Lead and develop the Quality team.
• Establish the team's operating cadence and evolve how the team works as Quality Agents reduce manual coordination work.
• Oversee embedded quality management staffing sold as a service to customers, ensuring the role owns the specific quality programmes and initiatives those customers pay for.
• Develop playbooks for AI-driven quality management and keep staffing-as-a-service delivery aligned with LILT's quality standards.

What you'll bring

Must have

• Significant experience running quality systems, including leading audits (internal and external), compliance programmes, and writing and maintaining processes and procedures. Quality certifications such as Six Sigma are a plus.
• Judgment-based quality: you've managed quality for work where the output is partly subjective and delivered by expert teams, including writing rubrics and guidelines, calibrating reviewers and designing sampling-based QA.
• Agent building: hands-on experience designing and building LLM-based agents yourself, and partnering with Product and Engineering to take them into production. Please be ready to walk us through agents you have built.
• Experience leading structured CI (RCA, CAPA, KPI reviews).
• People leadership: you've led and developed quality teams, ideally including managers.
• Customer advisory and cross-functional partnership: a clear communicator who can translate customer quality requirements into acceptance criteria and governance, advise on quality, cost and speed trade-offs, and work credibly with customers, executives and technical teams.
• Data-driven quality management: comfortable working hands-on with quality data (spreadsheets, BI tools, SQL) and turning it into actionable metrics, preventive controls and measurable improvements.

Nice to have

• Background in localisation, translation or language services.
• Experience in customer-facing quality roles for enterprise accounts.
• Research and Product collaboration: a track record of working with research scientists and product managers to turn quality insight into product requirements and shipped improvements.

Our Story

Our founders, Spence and John met at Google working on Google Translate. As researchers at Stanford and Berkeley, they both worked on language technology to make information accessible to everyone. While together at Google, they were amazed to learn that Google Translate wasn’t used for enterprise products and services inside the company.The quality just wasn’t there. So they set out to build something better. LILT was born.

LILT has been a machine learning company since its founding in 2015. At the time, machine translation didn’t meet the quality standard for enterprise translations, so LILT assembled a cutting-edge research team tasked with closing that gap. While meeting customer demand for translation services, LILT has prioritized investments in Large Language Models, human-in-the-loop systems, and now agentic AI.

With AI innovation accelerating and enterprise demand growing, the next phase of LILT’s journey is just beginning.

Our Tech

What sets our platform apart:

• Brand-aware AI that learns your voice, tone, and terminology to ensure every translation is accurate and consistent
• Agentic AI workflows that automate the entire translation process from content ingestion to quality review to publishing
• 100+ native integrations with systems like Adobe Experience Manager, Webflow, Salesforce, GitHub, and Google Drive to simplify content translation
• Human-in-the-loop reviews via our global network of professional linguists, for high-impact content that requires expert review

LILT in the News

• Featured in The Software Report’s Top 100 Software Companies!
• LILT makes it onto the Inc. 5000 List.
• LILT’s continues to be an intellectual powerhouse, holding numerous patents that help power the most efficient and sophisticated AI and language models in the industry.
• Check out all our news on our website.

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At LILT, we are committed to a fair, inclusive, and transparent hiring process. As part of our recruitment efforts, we may use artificial intelligence (AI) and automated tools to assist in the evaluation of applications, including résumé screening, assessment scoring, and interview analysis. These tools are designed to support human decision-making and help us identify qualified candidates efficiently and objectively. All final hiring decisions are made by people. If you have any concerns, require accommodations, or would like to opt-out of the use of AI in our hiring process, please let us know at [email protected].

LILT is an equal opportunity employer. We extend equal opportunity to all individuals without regard to an individual’s race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic characteristics, veteran or marital status, pregnancy, or any other classification protected by applicable local, state or federal laws. We are committed to the principles of fair employment and the elimination of all discriminatory practices.

Compensation: $115K - $140K