Head of Operations — Linguistic Validation & Translation (Calgary)

About Cethos

Cethos is a life-sciences language company specializing in linguistic validation, Clinical Outcome Assessments (COA/eCOA), cognitive debriefing, and clinician review. We help CROs, pharma, biotech, medical device companies, and eCOA platform vendors run submission-ready, ISPOR-aligned translation and validation programs across global clinical trials.

The Role

You'll be our first dedicated operations leader, working alongside the founders at our Calgary headquarters and owning delivery end to end: every project that comes in — linguistic validation, cognitive debriefing, clinician review, certified translation — leaves on time, on quality, and on margin. Today that machinery is run day-to-day by the founders; your job is to take it over, systematize it, and build the team that scales it. We especially welcome candidates who built their operations career internationally — at a language service provider, CRO, or BPO abroad — and are now based in Canada: that background is exactly what this operation looks like from the inside.

What You'll Do

• Own delivery across all service lines: intake, scheduling, resourcing, quality gates, and on-time handoff to clients, across concurrent multi-language projects.
• Lead and grow the operations team — project managers and coordinators in Calgary and remote — including hiring, training, and performance.
• Define and track the numbers that matter: on-time delivery, turnaround times, gross margin per project, rework rates, and client escalations.
• Own the operating system: workflows in our in-house project portal, automation of repetitive steps, and clear escalation paths for at-risk projects.
• Own quality in practice — QA gates for cognitive debriefing and clinician review reports, corrective actions run to closure, and documentation kept audit-ready in line with ISPOR good practices and our ISO 17100 certification program.
• Plan vendor capacity with our vendor management function so the linguist, interviewer, and clinician network is ahead of the pipeline, not behind it.
• Partner with business development on scoping and capacity, so every commitment we sell is one we can deliver.

What You Need

• 5+ years in operations or production at a language service provider, CRO, or comparable deadline-driven professional-services environment, including 2+ years leading a team — Canadian or international experience equally welcome.
• Hands-on familiarity with translation production workflows; direct linguistic validation or COA/clinical translation experience is a strong advantage.
• A builder’s track record: processes you created, metrics you moved, teams you grew — be ready to walk us through them.
• Comfort managing a distributed team and freelance network across languages and time zones.
• Excellent written and spoken English, and calm, professional communication under deadline pressure.
• Ability to work on-site at our downtown Calgary office and legal authorization to work in Canada.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with ISPOR / ISOQOL good-practice methodology for COA translation and cognitive debriefing.
• Experience preparing for or operating under ISO 17100 or ISO 9001.
• Experience with a TMS or CAT environment (XTM, memoQ, Trados, Phrase, or similar) and with evaluating tooling.
• Additional working languages.

What We Offer

• Real scope: this is the senior delivery seat, reporting directly to the founders, with a mandate to build rather than maintain.
• Meaningful work: the instruments and documents we handle end up in front of patients and regulators in active clinical trials.
• A modern stack: our automation-heavy in-house portal handles the repetitive work, so your team’s time goes into judgment, not admin.
• Benefits plan for Calgary-based staff, including group health and dental coverage.
• Downtown Calgary office steps from the CTrain, regular business hours.

Equal Opportunity

Cethos is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates and are happy to provide accommodation during the recruitment process on request.