Strategic Project Lead - Finance

Appen's Strategic Project Management team is central to the company's growth strategy, partnering with leading AI companies and frontier model developers to deliver the data that makes models work. As Strategic Project Lead - Finance, you will run strategic finance pilots and research projects for financial AI model training and evaluation, from initial scoping through to operationalization. This is a hands-on role bridging customer objectives, financial expertise, and Appen's global delivery capability.

Your Impact
You'll own the success of frontier financial AI pilots, turning emerging use cases into validated programs that meet defined standards for financial quality, feasibility, and cost. You will shape how market data, financial statements, filings, disclosures, and quantitative and risk models are used for model training and evaluation. This role is responsible for turning a pilot into a scalable project including workflows, expert requirements, and quality standards, developed with researchers and Appen's global delivery teams.

What You Bring
Strong background in finance, financial engineering, economics, or accounting. 2+ years leading complex projects, operational workflows or finance initiatives. Depth in financial data, markets, accounting, or modeling, and the ability to judge when a dataset is fit for purpose. Comfort working at pace in a high-intensity environment with an entrepreneurial approach.

Nice to Have
E xperience with AI or ML companies, AI labs, or data annotation and evaluation projects. Experience managing finance-focused, technical, or data-intensive projects. Familiarity with data pipelines, AI training workflows, model evaluation, or human-in-the-loop operations.

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.