QA / Evaluation Lead

About the Program: 

Innodata's Federal Practice builds the trusted data layer for critical infrastructure Trust & Safety work. Partnering with a leading systems integrator, we're delivering a modern, governed data services platform in a secure federal (IL4) environment. Over an intensive 20-week phase, you'll help stand up a data services storefront, a DataCard governance framework, synthetic data integration, and Databricks write-back capabilities.

About the Role: 

As the QA/Evaluation Lead, you'll own quality and evaluation across the platform. You'll design the evaluation framework that measures whether our data services and outputs meet the bar, build repeatable test and validation processes, and give the team an objective read on readiness at each milestone. Partnering with the Delivery Owner and engineering leads, you'll turn quality from an afterthought into a measurable, demonstrable strength. It's a role for someone who thinks rigorously about evaluation and takes pride in evidence-backed quality.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and own the inter-annotator agreement (IAA) methodology for the Phase 1 demonstration corpus — metric selection (Cohen's kappa, Fleiss, Krippendorff's alpha), sampling design, adjudication workflow, and agreement thresholds
• Define evaluation framework architecture: test and evaluation plans, IAA targets, drift detection gates, and model performance metrics per SOW Section 2.9
• Configure and operate sampling-based quality control across the self-service and white-glove annotation paths during Phase D corpus production
• Design and implement confidence-threshold escalation routing from automated annotation to senior-annotator adjudication
• Validate quality scoring and IAA computation within the Innodata data layer
• Support AI Solutions Engineer on evaluation design for SAM 2 and Frontier model API validation — define what 'good enough' looks like quantitatively
• Produce evaluation framework documentation for the Phase 1 NPP closeout package, including per-DataCard documentation with the SA

Must-Have Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Statistics, Data Science, Computer Science, or related quantitative field required; Master's degree preferred. Equivalent experience may substitute for degree on a 2-for-1 basis.
• 6+ years total professional experience, 4+ years in data quality, evaluation methodology, or QA on AI/ML programs
• IAA methodology expertise — Cohen's kappa, Fleiss' kappa, Krippendorff's alpha: hands-on, not theoretical
• Evaluation framework design for AI/ML training data programs
• QC process design: sampling methodology, escalation workflows, adjudication protocols
• Python for QC tooling, metric computation, and statistical analysis
• Active Secret clearance with TS/SCI eligibility

Nice-to-Have Qualifications:

• Prior DoD or IC data quality program experience
• CVAT or equivalent annotation platform QC workflow configuration
• Drift detection and model monitoring methodology
• Experience with FMV / video annotation quality standards

The expected hourly salary range for this position is $45 to $50 p/hour, based on experience, skills, and qualifications.

Note to Candidates: 

This role is not a project manager with QC responsibilities — it is a methodology expert who owns the intellectual framework behind data quality on a federal AI program. The right candidate can walk into a meeting with Government evaluators and explain exactly why the evaluation design produces trustworthy labels. That conversation is part of Phase 2 positioning.