Pixel-art portrait of Bree Jones

I went to school for graphic design because I loved art. Drawing, digital work, making things by hand and on-screen. That was always where I felt most like myself. I graduated from FAMU and almost immediately realized that making art for other people was not the path for me. Handing creative work over to a client and watching it become something safer, flatter, and more generic was demoralizing in a way I was not prepared for. So I pivoted. I took a tech support role at Dropbox, and while I did not love the calls, I loved the learning. I loved becoming a subject matter expert, understanding new systems quickly, and knowing what was coming before most people did. That feeling has never really left me.

The pattern across every role since has been fairly consistent. I come in early, find the gaps, and build. At Facebook, I started as a QA contractor on a team of 12. I built the onboarding process, wrote documentation that outlasted my time there, and was functioning as an unofficial team lead by the time the team had grown to 50. That work led to a full-time project manager role on a different team and, as it turned out, my entry into ML operations. From there, I was recruited to Pinterest as the first hire on their data labeling and relevance program manager team. At The Browser Company, I built their LLM evaluation framework from scratch and stood up a data pipeline to analyze user feedback at scale. The throughline is clear to me now: I do my best work when things are new, messy, and undefined. I like building the system, setting the standard, and leaving things in better shape than I found them.

Also, the graphic design background never went away. It shows up in every presentation I build, every tool I design, every document I put my name on. I used to treat it as a side skill, something adjacent to the real work. Over time I've realized I'm exercising the same muscle. I want everything I build to work well and look like it was made with intention.

Dropbox Solutions Specialist 20152017
Meta Triage Specialist 20172018
Meta Project Manager, Product Data Ops 20182021
Pinterest Data Labeling & Relevance Program Manager 20212025
The Browser Company Product Operations, LLM Evals 20252026

Choose an area to explore

Human Data Operations is the infrastructure layer behind model quality, safety, and product reliability, even when it gets treated like back-office work. I've spent eight years building programs that hold up under pressure: annotation systems from scratch at Meta and Pinterest, eight-figure vendor portfolios, and 20 million-plus annotations a year across search, ads, and trust and safety.

Vendor portfolio and operations. I've managed vendor portfolios north of $16M, run full RFP processes, and coordinated workforces of 300-plus across dozens of locales. I know how to build accountability into vendor relationships early, so quality, cost, and delivery issues are visible before they become emergencies.

Annotation infrastructure and tooling. I've owned annotation platform selection, implementation, and technical coordination with engineering, including full RFPs, vendor migrations, workflow design, and integration requirements. At Pinterest, I completed a dual-platform transition in six months against a typical one-year timeline.

QA and quality infrastructure. I build annotation QA systems from the ground up, including IRR monitoring, calibration workflows, sampling protocols, and escalation paths. At Pinterest, the QA infrastructure I designed improved annotation quality 20 percent across all programs.

Safety and responsible AI programs. I've supported ML safety classifier programs at Meta and built trust and safety annotation infrastructure at Pinterest, including EAP support for raters reviewing sensitive content. When Pinterest needed to mobilize quickly on a content issue, the operational structure was already in place.

ML lifecycle. I treat annotation as part of the model performance feedback loop, not a standalone production function. That means surfacing re-training data needs, identifying annotation gaps tied to model regressions, and connecting what models struggle with back to the labeling pipelines that can improve them.

Cross-functional influence. I translate data quality into business risk so engineering, product, and leadership teams understand why the infrastructure matters. At Pinterest, the QA program I built started as self-funded informal audits and became a formal investment with dedicated headcount.

Direct management and mentorship. I've directly managed and trained QA specialists, contractors, and program managers across Meta and Pinterest. As the founding PM on Pinterest's data labeling and relevance team, I trained every program manager who joined after me and built the documentation, onboarding, and operating practices that kept the program from depending on one person.

Tools: Appen / Figure Eight, Labelbox, Google Sheets + Apps Script, BigQuery, SQL, Tableau, Retool

When I'm off the clock, I'm usually playing something or making something. The short version:

Playing
Stardew Valley Coral Island Hades 1 & 2 God of War Horizon Forbidden West
Making
Digital art Crochet Painting FDM printing Resin printing 3D modeling
Eating & drinking
Seafood Japanese Vietnamese Taiwanese Low-lit cocktail bars
Reading & watching
Brandon Sanderson books One Piece Witch Hat Atelier Daemons of the Shadow Realm Severance Monk
Travel wishlist
Portugal Spain Japan South Korea Montreal

Florida-raised, Oakland-based, and more of an extrovert than people expect. If I'm invited somewhere, I'm probably going.

Outside the program and operations tracks I've spent years building, these are three areas I could see myself pivoting to:

AreaWhy I'm drawn to it
Product Management The closest to where I already am. Cross-functional coordination, product sense, tooling, launch readiness. I've lived right next to it for years and can see myself making the move.
Design Program Management The same instinct behind a lot of this site: after years deep in technical work, I want to be closer to the creative side again. Not as a designer, just near it.
Product Marketing Simple, really: I've loved every product I've worked on, and helping promote something I believe in sounds like work I'd be good at and genuinely enjoy.

If you're recruiting for these roles and open to discussing what that would look like at your company, please reach out.

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