Director, Datasets
Reporting to: Senior Director of Audio & Datasets
About the Role
As Side continues to expand its Datasets business, we are seeking an experienced Director of Datasets to define and lead the next stage of our growth across AI training data, speech technology, multimodal datasets and emerging data collection services.
Reporting to the Senior Director of Audio & Datasets, this role will provide the strategic, commercial and operational leadership for Side’s global Datasets line of business.
The successful candidate will oversee the continued expansion of our market-leading speech and voice dataset services, while helping establish new capabilities across image, video, transcription, annotation, multimodal and crowdsourced data collection.
This is a highly strategic position combining:
- Solution design
- Commercial leadership
- Operational excellence
- Client partnership
- Industry expertise
The Director of Datasets will work closely with Sales, Solutions, Production and Legal teams to define scalable service offerings, pricing models, delivery methodologies and long-term business strategy.
The ideal candidate will bring significant experience delivering large-scale dataset collection programmes, along with deep knowledge of industry processes, commercial models and emerging trends across AI data generation and machine learning.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Leadership
- Define and execute the long-term strategy for Side’s Datasets business.
- Identify opportunities to expand beyond speech datasets into new collection services, including image, video, multimodal, transcription, annotation and other AI training data.
- Evaluate emerging technologies, methodologies and market trends to ensure Side remains competitive.
- Help shape investment priorities, capability development and future service offerings.
- Support diversification of the client portfolio across technology, AI and adjacent industries.
Solution Architecture and Delivery
- Lead solution design for complex client requirements across bespoke dataset collection projects.
- Develop scalable methodologies for global data collection programmes involving professional talent, crowdsourced contributors, partner studios and distributed workforces.
- Identify the most appropriate collection platforms, tooling, technologies, payment methods and workflows for each engagement.
- Collaborate with Production, Legal and other business units to ensure practical and commercially viable delivery models.
- Define best practices for quality assurance, validation, metadata, rights management and delivery standards.
Commercial and Pricing Expertise
- Act as the subject matter expert for dataset pricing, costing and commercial strategy.
- Develop pricing frameworks covering a wide range of dataset collection methodologies and licensing models.
- Support Sales and Solutions teams during client discovery sessions, proposal development and contract negotiations.
- Evaluate project scope, assumptions, commercial risks and resource requirements.
- Advise leadership on market pricing, competitive positioning and new commercial opportunities.
Client Partnership
- Serve as a trusted adviser during client discussions involving AI training data and dataset collection.
- Translate complex technical requirements into practical, scalable delivery solutions.
- Build trusted relationships with AI companies, technology organisations, publishers and enterprise clients.
- Demonstrate Side’s expertise and capabilities throughout the sales process.
- Support key client engagements from initial consultation through to successful delivery.
Operational Leadership
- Lead and develop the global Datasets team.
- Provide coaching, mentoring, performance management and career development.
- Establish KPIs and operational objectives aligned with business growth.
- Develop scalable internal processes that support efficient delivery across multiple collection types and global regions.
- Foster collaboration across Audio, QA, Player Support and other business units.
Industry Thought Leadership
- Represent Side as a recognised authority within the AI datasets and data collection industry.
- Monitor developments in AI model training, synthetic data, multimodal datasets, crowdsourcing platforms and data licensing.
- Identify opportunities to introduce new methodologies that improve quality, efficiency, scalability and commercial competitiveness.
- Contribute to Side’s positioning as a premium global provider of high-quality AI datasets.
What We’re Looking For
Required Experience
- At least five years’ experience within datasets, machine learning or AI data collection, data operations or a related industry.
- Proven experience leading large-scale dataset collection programmes across multiple markets or languages.
- Strong understanding of AI training data requirements and collection methodologies.
- Experience designing scalable operational workflows for global data collection projects.
- Demonstrated commercial experience, including pricing, estimation, proposal development and client solutioning.
- Experience working directly with enterprise or technology clients.
- Strong understanding of legal, licensing, consent and rights management considerations relating to dataset collection.
- Experience leading multidisciplinary teams and collaborating across global organisations.
Ideal Profile
- Experience across multiple dataset types, including speech, image, video, transcription, annotation, multimodal or synthetic data.
- Experience with both professionally managed and crowdsourced collection models.
- Strong knowledge of data quality assurance, validation, metadata and delivery standards.
- Commercially minded, with strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Confident presenting complex solutions to senior stakeholders and clients.
- A strategic thinker capable of balancing innovation with operational delivery.
- Passionate about AI technologies and emerging market trends.
- Highly autonomous, collaborative and proactive.
About Side
Side, formerly PTW, is a global video game development and services provider offering technical and creative solutions to many of the largest developers and studios around the world.
Founded in 2009, and drawing on more than 30 years’ experience from our parent company in Japan, Side has grown to become a global force with 20 studios across 14 countries throughout North America, Europe, South America and Asia.
Our industry-leading services include:
- Game development
- Art production
- Audio production
- Quality assurance
- Localisation
- Localisation QA
- Player support
- Community management
- Datasets
Our Datasets business has become an increasingly strategic part of Side, providing high-quality AI training data across more than 85 languages through our global network of partner studios and contributors.
We support everything from premium voice likeness collections through to large-scale multilingual data programmes, helping shape the next generation of AI technologies.
Help us bring stories to the world. Join a global team helping define the future of AI datasets and machine learning.
