Head of Operations — Linguistic Validation & Translation (Remote)

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, 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. It's a hands-on leadership role for someone who has run production at a language service provider or clinical-services company and wants real ownership of how an operation grows.

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 across time zones — 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.
• 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.
• Genuine availability during North American (Mountain Time) business hours, Monday to Friday, from wherever you are based.

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.

Why Join Cethos

• 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.
• A small, collaborative team headquartered in Calgary, Canada, working with clients worldwide.

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.