Strategic Sourcing Lead

About the Role

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.

What You Bring

• 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.

Nice to Haves

• 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.

Compensation

Additional Information

Why You'll Love Working Here

At Appen, we foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence. We value curiosity, accountability, and a commitment to delivering the highest quality AI solutions for frontier models.

You'll work on complex challenges that shape the future of AI across industries and geographies, alongside talented people in a culture that values humility over ego. You'll have the flexibility to deliver in a way that works for you and your team, supported by tools, resources, and development opportunities to continue to build your capability over time.

About Appen

Appen has been a leader in AI training data for over 30 years. We specialise 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.