Senior Manager, Professional Development

Lead a team of project managers responsible for delivering and scaling IANS’ professional development products. Drive client engagement, product performance, and cross-functional alignment to support revenue growth and participant outcomes.

Requires a minimum of 3 days onsite in Boston Office

$104,000 - $130,000 + bonus

Goals and Objectives:

• Manage, coach, and develop project managers to ensure consistent execution and high-quality delivery across programs.
• Set priorities, allocate resources, and serve as the senior escalation point for client, product, and operational issues.
• Foster a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and data based decision-making.

Regular Responsibilities:

Product Strategy & Growth

• Evaluate product performance and identify opportunities to enhance value, scale delivery, and drive growth.
• Lead product improvement initiatives, partnering with Technology, Product, and BI to inform roadmap decisions and optimize user experience.
• Use data and client insights to shape program evolution and future capabilities.

Client Engagement & Stakeholder Partnership

• Oversee participant onboarding and engagement strategy to ensure clarity of goals and program impact.
• Partner closely with Sales and Account Managers to elevate client experience, support renewals, and strengthen alignment with client needs.
• Gather and synthesize client and participant feedback to inform improvements and future enhancements.

Operational Excellence & Process Innovation

• Oversee operational workflows, ensuring accuracy in reporting, Faculty payments, session logistics, and curriculum delivery.
• Drive process improvements and cross-functional initiatives that enhance scalability and operational efficiency.
• Maintain strong partnerships with BI, Technology, and internal stakeholders to improve systems, workflows, and program reporting.

Business Insight & Cross-Functional Leadership

• Provide strategic insights on product performance, client trends, and operational risks to senior leadership.
• Partner with Sales, Finance, Marketing, and Analytics to support forecasting, pricing, product positioning, and go-to-market planning.

Preferred Qualifications

• 7+ years in professional development, L&D, product delivery, or program management, ideally in a professional services environment.
• 3+ years leading and developing teams with a strong coaching mindset.
• Strong client communication skills with the ability to manage escalations and influence stakeholders.
• Demonstrated success improving operational processes and scaling program delivery.
• Solid business acumen and comfort with forecasting, pricing, performance reporting, and running profit and loss with understanding of margins.

About the Role 

IANS Research is launching a new data product for the cybersecurity market. The Director, Research Operations will own the end-to-end data collection engine that powers this product — building an in-house CATI interview program from scratch, managing third-party panel firms and industry partnerships for external data collection, and ensuring data quality across all channels. 

This is a program-building role, not a program-maintaining role. You will stand up a seven-figure annual research operation covering dozens of security technology markets through both internally-run videoconference interviews and externally-fielded online surveys through panel firms and industry partnerships. You will hire and manage a team of research interviewers, own vendor relationships with panel firms, negotiate industry data-sharing partnerships, and be accountable for hitting response targets across complex firmographic quotas. 

The data your team collects is the product’s competitive moat. The quality, depth, and consistency of the data we deliver depends directly on how well this operation is designed and run. 

Why This Role Matters 

This product is a strategic growth initiative for IANS. Its success depends entirely on having high-quality, structured data that provides unparalleled insight to our clients. The data your team collects compounds over time, strengthens with each collection cycle, and creates a flywheel that will lead to ever-increasing client engagement and value delivery. 

Core Responsibilities:

CATI Program Leadership (~40% of time) 

• Build and manage the in-house CATI interview program, targeting hundreds of completed interviews per year across multiple high-priority security technology markets.
• Hire, train, and manage a team of onshore US research interviewers conducting structured Zoom/Teams interviews with senior security practitioners.
• Own interviewer quality: monitor call recordings, review data completeness, coach on probing technique, and ensure interviewers can facilitate substantive technical conversations with senior security professionals.
• Design, execute and optimize the interview scheduling pipeline in coordination with IANS account managers — ensuring the right practitioner is identified and scheduled for each market-specific interview.
• Manage throughput against targets with real-time visibility into coverage gaps by market, product, industry, and revenue band.
• Own the market rotation schedule and ensure smooth transitions as new markets come online each year 

Third-Party Panel & Partnership Management (~30% of time) 

• Own relationships with B2B panel firms for external market data collection, managing significant annual external spend across multiple markets per year.
• Negotiate contracts, define screening criteria, set quality SLAs, and manage panel firm performance against cost-per-complete and data quality benchmarks.
• Create and manage ~20-30 survey variants for each specific topic to be covered by third-party panels.
• Manage industry association partnerships for supplementary sourcing in key verticals — co-branded survey distribution, partnership fee negotiation, and respondent incentive structures.
• Define and enforce quality assurance protocols for non-IANS respondents: screening layers, in-survey attention checks, completion time analysis, identity verification, and post-survey validation against known market patterns.
• Manage oversampling plans to account for expected rejection rates on panel-sourced completes.
• Evaluate and onboard new panel partners as needed to maintain coverage across niche and emerging security markets 

Survey Operations & Platform Management (~15% of time) 

• Own survey programming and fielding in Qualtrics for self-administered survey instruments.
• Manage the annual survey lifecycle: deployment timing, reminder cadence, completion rate optimization, and data integration with CRM firmographics.
• Coordinate survey distribution to appropriate contacts at IANS client organizations (different personas depending on specific survey) 

Data Quality & Sample Design (~15% of time) 

• Own sample design and quota management across all channels: ensuring adequate firmographic coverage (industry, revenue band, team size) to support filtered benchmarking in the product.
• Maintain real-time dashboards tracking completions vs. targets by market, product, firmographic segment, and channel.
• Identify and escalate coverage gaps early; develop corrective strategies (alternative outreach, adjusted incentives, supplementary panels).
• Collaborate with the product team on statistical modeling requirements — understanding how sample composition affects downstream data quality in the product.
• Manage client touchpoint budgets to prevent survey fatigue across multiple research programs 

Requirements 

Must Have 

• 5+ years of experience managing primary research operations, with direct experience running CATI or structured phone interview programs at meaningful scale (500+ annual completions).
• Demonstrated experience managing third-party panel firm relationships — contract negotiation, quality SLA enforcement, cost-per-complete optimization, and multi-vendor coordination.
• Experience building or significantly scaling a research operation (not just maintaining an existing one) — you’ve stood up teams, designed workflows, and iterated on processes in a fast-moving environment.
• People management experience: you’ve hired, trained, and performance-managed research staff (interviewers, analysts, or field managers).
• Strong command of survey methodology: questionnaire design, sample design, quota management, mode effects, response rate optimization, and data quality frameworks.
• Proven experience operating with high autonomy — making methodology, vendor selection, and quality framework decisions without heavy oversight.
• Possesses the leadership skills, presence and gravitas to be an effective counterpart to panel firm account teams and industry partnership leads.
• Experience with Qualtrics or comparable survey platforms for both programming and fielding.
• Comfort managing a research budget of $500K+ including external vendor spend. 

Strongly Preferred 

• Experience in B2B technology research, cybersecurity, or adjacent domains (IT infrastructure, enterprise software) — you understand the audience and can evaluate whether an interviewer is asking the right follow-up questions.
• Experience managing industry association, trade group, or consortium-based data partnerships (not just commercial panel firms).
• Background at a research firm (Gartner, Forrester, IDC, or similar), market research agency, or in-house insights function at a B2B technology company.
• Familiarity with hierarchical modeling or small-sample statistical techniques (you don’t need to build the models, but you need to understand how sample composition decisions affect model outputs).
• Experience with mixed-mode research designs (CATI + online) and managing data comparability across collection methods 

Nice to Have 

• Experience standing up research operations that serve a data product (not just ad hoc reports) — you understand the difference between collecting data for a one-time study vs. feeding a continuously-updated product.
• Experience with provider-sourced practitioner interview models in adjacent industries (e.g., healthcare IT, enterprise technology).
• Familiarity with GenAI tools for transcription, interview summarization, and data coding workflows 

Compensation & Benefits 

• Base salary: $128,000–$160,000 depending on experience. (plus bonus)
• Performance bonus tied to program milestones (response rate targets, data quality metrics, on-time market delivery).
• Boston preferred for proximity to IANS HQ. Standard IANS benefits package.
• Opportunity to build and shape a critical function from the ground up in a high-growth environment 

About the Role 

IANS is building an innovative new data product for security leaders. The Research Interviewer is the frontline of our data collection effort — conducting structured phone interviews with CISOs and senior security practitioners to capture detailed, verified quantitative and qualitative data on their experience with certain security-related operational tasks. 

This is not a call center role. You will be having substantive technical conversations with senior security professionals about their real-world experience with key security operational tasks. You need enough cybersecurity domain knowledge to ask intelligent follow-up questions, recognize when an answer needs probing, and capture nuanced insights that go beyond surface-level satisfaction scores. 

You will also serve as the key liaison between the Research team and IANS’ account management team, coordinating client outreach, scheduling, and ensuring we hit our target response rates across all markets and firmographic segments. 

Core Responsibilities 

Interview Coordination & Scheduling (~25% of time) 

• Work with sales account managers to identify the best interview contacts at each client — the person with the most hands-on experience with a given topic, not necessarily the CISO.
• Persistently follow up with AMs to get introductions made and interviews scheduled; track and escalate when outreach stalls.
• Maintain a master tracker of interviews completed vs. needed by market, product, client, industry, and revenue band to identify coverage gaps.
• Coordinate scheduling directly with practitioners once introductions are made; accommodate busy executive calendars with flexibility. 

Conducting CATI Interviews (~40% of time) 

• Conduct 60-minute structured phone interviews with verified security practitioners using the IANS CATI survey instrument.
• Cover all survey sections during interview (survey questions will be provided by product and research team).
• Ask intelligent, probing follow-up questions when responses are vague, surface-level, or inconsistent — the goal is detailed, usable data & insights, not checkbox completion.
• Vet any quantitative data points required from the user to ensure data is fact-based and high-quality.
• Record all interviews (with consent) and capture real-time notes during the call to supplement the recording.
• Target throughput: ~7-10 completed interviews per week (accounting for scheduling, cancellations, and rescheduling) 

Data Processing & Quality (~25% of time) 

• Enter all structured data from each interview into the survey platform (Qualtrics) accurately and completely.
• Edit and process verbatim quotes from interview recordings: remove filler words (“um,” “you know,” “like”), fix grammar, and ensure quotes are fully coherent and attributable — while preserving the practitioner’s authentic voice.
• Flag data quality issues: inconsistent responses, potential conflicts of interest, respondents who lack sufficient product experience to provide reliable data.
• Ensure all interviews are properly tagged with firmographic metadata (industry, revenue band, team size) for downstream filtering 

Coverage Tracking & Reporting (~10% of time) 

• Maintain a real-time dashboard of interview completions by market, product, industry, and revenue band vs. target sample sizes.
• Identify gaps in firmographic coverage (e.g., “we have 15 financial services respondents but only 3 for healthcare”) and work with AMs to fill them.
• Provide weekly status reports to the Research PM on throughput, coverage gaps, scheduling pipeline, and AM responsiveness.
• Flag early if target response rates are at risk and recommend corrective actions (e.g., different outreach approach, incentive adjustments, alternative contacts) 

Requirements: 

• 1+ years of experience conducting structured research interviews, CATI surveys, or qualitative research with senior professionals (B2B context strongly preferred).
• Familiarity with cybersecurity concepts and terminology — you don’t need to be a practitioner, but you need to understand the basics and be able to facilitate a technical conversation about implementation challenges.
• Strong interpersonal skills: ability to build rapport quickly with senior executives, keep conversations on track, and ask tough follow-up questions diplomatically.
• Meticulous data entry and editing skills — comfort processing interview recordings into clean, quotable verbatim text.
• Organized and persistent: able to manage a pipeline of 30–50 scheduled and pending interviews simultaneously across multiple markets.
• Comfort working with Qualtrics or similar survey platforms for data entry.
• Based in the US (onshore requirement for data quality with technical audience) 

Nice to Have 

• Background in cybersecurity, IT, or adjacent technical field (even in a non-practitioner capacity — e.g., analyst, sales engineer, product marketing).
• Experience with market research firms (Gartner, Forrester, IDC, KLAS) or B2B research agencies.
• Familiarity with CATI methodology, sample management, and quota tracking.
• Experience with Bayesian modeling concepts or statistical analysis (for collaboration with our modeling contractor) 

Why This Role Matters 

The data you collect is the moat. Without high-quality, structured interview data from verified practitioners, this new product has no differentiation. Every interview you conduct feeds a proprietary data asset that compounds over time, cannot be replicated by competitors or LLMs, and directly drives IANS’ revenue growth. This is not a support function — it is the core engine of a new product line projected to generate significant incremental revenue. 

Compensation & Benefits 

• Base salary: $60,000–$75,000 depending on experience (plus bonus)
• Opportunity to grow into a senior research or research management role as the data collection function scales 

Position Overview 

IANS is seeking a User Interface Designer to help elevate the design quality, speed, and consistency of IANS’ security decision support platform. 

This role will focus on executing polished, user-centered interfaces and helping translate design concepts and business requirements into developer-ready designs. The designer will work closely with Product, Engineering, and Content teams to create cohesive visual patterns and user interfaces that scale. 

You’ll collaborate directly with the Senior Product Designer, who provides product direction, wireframes, and user journeys. You’ll have the opportunity to transform those foundations into detailed, implementation-ready interfaces that reflect IANS’ evolving product identity and its increasingly interconnected ecosystem of content and data. 

This position is ideal for someone who loves details, design systems, and the craft of UI design—and who wants to help demonstrate the business value of consistent, thoughtful interface designs. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Execute high-fidelity designs based on provided wireframes, user journeys, and product requirements. Deliver clear specifications, responsive layouts, and interaction states ready for engineering handoff in Figma.
• Design and refine interfaces that connect security decision support workflows with related data and content types (e.g., frameworks, articles, and reports)
• Contribute to professional development tools and experiences that help security leaders and their teams track progress, manage learning, and engage with personalized content tied to their professional development.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Content teams to ensure consistency and clarity in how content and interface design work together.
• Translate design specifications into developer-ready deliverables, partnering closely with engineers on implementation and QA.
• Support usability improvements by refining interaction states and adhering to accessibility standards.
• Help document design decisions and UI standards to make design work transparent and scalable across teams.
• Contribute to shared visual patterns that improve design and development efficiency, including components, tokens, and layout standards in Figma.
• Stay current with evolving UI trends, design tools, and best practices to keep our product experiences up-to-date and intuitive. 

Key Skills & Qualifications 

• 3-5 years of experience in User Interface, Product, or Visual Design roles.
• A portfolio that demonstrates ability to work from wireframes, user journeys, and prototypes to produce complete, engineering-ready UI designs.
• Proficiency in Figma, including components, variants, Auto Layout, and documentation best practices.
• Experience designing for content- and data-rich environments where multiple content types or data relationships drive the interface.
• Strong understanding of responsive design, accessibility, and component-based systems.
• Skilled at preparing implementation-ready design deliverables, including clear specifications and interaction notes, ensuring smooth collaboration and accurate builds with engineering.
• Able to evaluate live experiences to spot usability or visual issues and propose high-impact refinements that improve clarity, cohesion, and overall quality.
• Basic familiarity with front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React) and ability to collaborate effectively with developers.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills. Comfortable giving and receiving feedback across departments and skill levels.
• Organized, detail-oriented, and able to manage multiple design tasks independently.
• Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design, Visual Communication, Interaction Design, or equivalent practical experience. 

Agentic Lead / Applied AI Prototyper

$144,000 - $180,000 + bonus

About IANS Research

IANS Research is the leading resource for information security and technology risk professionals. Our faculty-driven model delivers practitioner-grade advisory, research, and tools that help CISOs and their teams make better decisions faster. With 229 employees and a growing AI-enabled product portfolio, IANS is at an inflection point—investing heavily in agentic AI capabilities that extend and amplify our proprietary IP.

Position Summary

The Agentic Lead / Applied AI Prototyper is a builder role embedded in New Product Development with one clear mission: prototype agentic workflows and AI-generated output formats that are grounded in IANS data and IP, move fast, and generate tangible artifacts the organization can evaluate, test, and scale.

This is not a strategy or advisory position. The Agentic Lead spends the majority of their time building—experimenting with Claude and other LLM frameworks, assembling multi-step agentic workflows, and producing concrete outputs (board-ready memos, diagnostics, risk scorecards, structured briefings) that demonstrate what AI-enabled IANS content can look like at its best.

Prototypes that demonstrate validated impact and repeatability graduate into the product backlog through a structured handoff process—ensuring that the Studio’s best work becomes durable product capability rather than orphaned experiments.

Key Responsibilities

Agentic Workflow Prototyping

• Design, build, and iterate on multi-step agentic workflows using Claude, LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, or comparable frameworks—grounded in IANS research content, faculty IP, and proprietary data assets.
• Develop workflow modules for high-priority use cases: AI-assisted meeting prep, automated CRM enrichment, research synthesis, client engagement plan generation, and renewal risk scoring.
• Build and test prompt architectures, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and structured output templates that produce consistent, high-quality, on-brand IANS artifacts.
• Maintain a rapid iteration cadence—prototype, test with internal stakeholders, discard or refine, and move on. Speed and learning velocity are the primary performance metrics here.

Output Format Development

• Produce working examples of AI-generated IANS output formats: board-ready security briefings, CISO diagnostics, risk scorecards, issue-based memos, and structured Ask-an-Expert summaries.
• Collaborate with faculty members to validate AI-generated artifacts for accuracy, nuance, and practical relevance—ensuring outputs meet the standard clients expect from IANS.
• Document the prompt patterns, data inputs, and workflow logic behind each successful output format so they can be reproduced, taught, and eventually scaled by the Enablement function.

Studio Operations & Knowledge Transfer

• Maintain an active, documented library of prototypes, agentic playbooks, and output templates—organized for eventual handoff to the AI Enablement Lead for broader deployment.
• Participate in structured handoff processes when Studio prototypes are ready for scaling—providing technical documentation, success criteria, and integration notes for the Ask IANS engineering team.
• Share learnings across the Studio, Ask IANS, and Enablement functions—contributing to a shared understanding of what works, what doesn’t, and what’s next.
• Engage directly with the CPO and NPD leadership to align Studio output priorities with organizational strategy.

Technical Exploration & Tooling

• Continuously evaluate emerging LLM capabilities, agentic frameworks, and AI tooling relevant to IANS’s use cases—bringing informed recommendations to the team rather than defaulting to the familiar.
• Assess and integrate new model capabilities (extended context, function calling, structured outputs, multi-agent coordination) as they become available.
• Identify infrastructure or data layer requirements that would unlock higher-quality agentic outputs and collaborate with Ask IANS engineering to address them.

Qualifications

Required

• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications or agentic workflows in a production or near-production context—not just experimentation.
• Proficiency in Python and comfort working with LLM APIs (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, or equivalent) including prompt engineering, function/tool calling, and structured output design.
• Experience with at least one agentic or RAG framework: LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, CrewAI, or similar.
• Strong instincts for what makes a good AI-generated output—able to evaluate quality, consistency, and fitness-for-purpose without always needing external validation.
• Ability to work in a fast, iterative environment with minimal process overhead—comfortable with ambiguity, able to self-direct, and oriented toward shipping over theorizing.
• Excellent written communication skills; able to document prototypes, playbooks, and workflows clearly enough that others can reproduce and build on them.

Preferred

• Experience working with RAG architectures including vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, or similar) and embedding pipelines.
• Background in content-heavy or knowledge-intensive domains (research, advisory, legal, financial services) where AI output quality and accuracy are non-negotiable.
• Familiarity with multi-agent architectures and orchestration patterns for complex, multi-step reasoning workflows.
• Experience producing structured, templated AI outputs (reports, scorecards, briefings) for professional audiences.
• Exposure to cybersecurity, information security, or technology risk content—or the ability to learn quickly in a domain-specific environment.
• Understanding of the IANS faculty model and how practitioner-grade advisory content is created, validated, and delivered to clients.

IANS Research is an equal opportunity employer.

AI Technical Lead

Requires minimum of 2 days a week onsite in Boston, MA office

$160,000 - $200,000 + bonus

About the Role

IANS is rapidly expanding its AI strategy toward a Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) model—delivering not only insights through our own applications, but also structured data feeds, APIs, and AI-ready interfaces that enable clients to build their own intelligent systems and agentic workflows.

We are seeking a highly skilled AI Technical Lead to drive the design, development, and evolution of both our internal AI systems and our client-facing agent platforms. This role serves as the technical authority across AI initiatives—architecting agentic systems, building reusable frameworks, and guiding the engineering strategy that powers IANS’ next generation of data-driven products.

You will own the full lifecycle of AI and ML systems, with deep expertise in LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agent design, and enterprise-grade architecture.

AI Architecture, Agent Systems & DaaS Platform Development

• Lead the design and development of AI agent systems aligned with IANS’ evolving DaaS strategy, enabling clients to consume IANS data feeds and build their own AI agents using proprietary, internal, and third-party data.
• Architect agentic workflows that orchestrate retrieval, reasoning, tool use, planning, and action execution across enterprise contexts.
• Develop reusable agent frameworks, primitives, and SDK-style abstractions that external clients can safely and flexibly extend for their own applications.
• Integrate RAG pipelines, tool use, APIs, and multi-agent patterns into robust, production-grade platforms.
• Define scalable abstractions for agent memory, tool orchestration, context management, and autonomous task execution.

Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Shape the long-term AI and agent-platform roadmap in partnership with product and engineering leaders.
• Serve as the primary subject-matter expert on agentic systems, LLM architectures, RAG, and DaaS platform design.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across AI initiatives, ensuring consistent engineering excellence.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, frameworks, and standards relevant to AI agents, data delivery, automation, and platform extensibility.

Software Engineering & Systems Integration

• Develop production-grade Python code using frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, LangChain, and modern agent toolkits.
• Design and maintain APIs, microservices, and developer-facing interfaces that enable both internal and external teams to integrate with IANS’ data and agent platforms.
• Implement robust testing, observability, logging, and performance optimization for complex agent workflows and model-driven systems.
• Ensure compatibility between internal systems and externally consumed SDKs, tools, and data interfaces.

AI Infrastructure, Deployment & MLOps

• Architect and manage scalable cloud-based AI/agent infrastructure (Azure preferred).
• Implement MLOps pipelines for continuous delivery, safe model updates, monitoring, evaluation, and governance.
• Build and maintain data pipelines supporting RAG, retrieval, embeddings, agent memory, and inference.
• Establish observability frameworks for agent behavior, tool interactions, and cost management.

Security, Governance & Enterprise-Grade Standards

• Define and enforce strict standards for security, data isolation, governance, observability, and cost control, especially when exposing agent capabilities and data products to clients.
• Ensure safe sandboxing, permissioning, and policy enforcement for client-built AI agents.
• Oversee compliance with regulatory frameworks (GDPR, CCPA, etc.) and responsible AI practices including fairness, explainability, privacy, and risk mitigation.

Qualifications & Skills

Required

• 5+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering, with 2+ years in a senior or lead role.
• Hands-on experience designing agentic AI systems, AI agents, or multi-agent frameworks for production environments.
• Deep expertise with LLMs, NLP, RAG pipelines, embeddings, and generative AI technologies.
• Strong Python engineering skills; experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, LangChain, etc.
• Experience architecting APIs, SDKs, or developer-facing tools used by external customers.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (Azure preferred), and scalable architectures.
• Familiarity with MLOps workflows, CI/CD, model monitoring, evaluation, and lifecycle management.
• Strong communication, leadership, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with LoRA, PEFT, RLHF, and advanced fine-tuning techniques.
• Background in data engineering supporting model training and retrieval.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, or large-scale microservice architectures.
• Experience applying ethical or responsible AI practices in enterprise contexts.

Why Join Us?

• Shape an industry-leading AI and DaaS platform powering the next generation of cybersecurity insights.
• Lead the architecture of agentic systems used by both internal teams and Fortune-class clients.
• Work with a highly skilled, collaborative team building forward-looking AI products.
• Competitive compensation, benefits, and opportunities for growth.