Lead Implementation Manager

Our mission is to build a fairer world through ethical AI. We have built the world’s most inclusive and intelligent human-centric talent solution to innovate the hiring process and disrupt broken practices, especially in high-volume recruitment. We believe that every candidate deserves a fair chance in getting a job and that, increasingly, organisations care about interrupting the bias that exists in hiring and promotion.

Over the last 8 years, we have built trusted partnerships with some of the most well-known consumer brands, which trust our AI solution to deliver better people faster and more fairly. Sapia.ai is proud of its diverse and globally distributed team across Australia, the UK and Europe. We are passionate about building a talented workforce of individuals from different backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities. By building a strong remote workforce, we empower our employees to work their own hours and focus on outcomes, helping them balance personal and professional lives. We love being scrappy and thrifty, and we never settle. If this mission and way of working excites you, then come and join us!

Role: Lead Implementation Manager

Reporting Manager (interim): CEO

Team: Customer Success

Employment Type: Full-time, remote-first

Location: Australia or New Zealand based (APAC time zones)

We’re looking for a Lead Implementation Manager to own the delivery of every new Sapia.ai customer across APAC — from the moment a deal is signed to the point where the customer is live, stable, and handed cleanly to Customer Success.

This is the single point of accountability during onboarding. You’ll orchestrate our Integrations Engineering, People Science and Marketing teams, alongside the customer’s own HR, IT and other stakeholders, into one coherent delivery. You won’t build the integrations or configure the models yourself — but you’ll make sure both happen on time, in scope, and to a quality bar that sets the customer up for the long term.

Between onboardings, you’ll own the thing that makes implementation scale: the methodology, playbooks, documentation and internal tooling that turn each delivery into a repeatable strength rather than a one-off. It’s a critical, high-trust role with real ownership — you’ll set the standard for what great implementation looks like at Sapia.

Our business is changing rapidly. While some responsibilities will stay constant, the priorities of this role will be revised as our strategy grows. Key areas of ownership:

End-to-end customer delivery

Own delivery of every new APAC customer from Closed-Won to stable in-life — through go-live and hypercare.

Act as the single point of accountability across Integrations Engineering, People Science, CSM, Marketing and customer-side teams.

Receive and validate the Sales-to-Implementation handover (scope, integration requirements, success criteria, sponsors) — and refuse incomplete ones.

Manage concurrent, multi-product implementations (Chat Pro, Chat Classic, JAS, Tia etc): timelines, dependencies, delays and stakeholder expectations.

Manage testing sign-off in sandbox and production, run the onboarding hypercare period, execute go-live, and complete a clean 60-day handover to the CSM.

Kickoff and change management

Represent Implementation at the Internal Customer Kickoff (ICKC) for every enterprise deal — the cross-functional session that maps the customer’s change profile before any customer-facing onboarding begins.

Translate what surfaces there — operating model, buy-in, stakeholder sensitivities, champions vs. detractors, and the customer’s own definition of success — directly into the delivery plan, risk register and change strategy.

Design and support customer-side change management, including workshops for new business-unit rollouts.

Design and sign off candidate communications, and support the customer’s internal comms.

Methodology, playbooks and documentation

Own the implementation methodology — the standard for how Sapia onboards customers — with the kickoff as a non-negotiable gate ahead of onboarding.

Build and maintain playbooks by customer archetype (e.g. Workday + Chat Pro + ANZ retail; SuccessFactors + Chat Classic + EMEA financial services).

Maintain the source of truth for implementation processes, runbooks (per ATS, per product, per region), and versioned as-built records so CSM and Support inherit clean documentation.

Run a retrospective on every completed implementation and feed the lessons back into the playbooks.

Customer Success enablement

Train new CSMs on what they inherit at handover and where to find it (including the change profile).

Train CSMs on platform configuration (EDGE assessments, statuses, dialogue) and on the in-life issues that originate in implementation choices.

Build self-serve enablement content alongside Customer Marketing.

Improvement, tooling and product feedback

Run improvement projects on at-risk or low-adoption accounts with the CSM; lead implementation reviews for accounts going through M&A, restructure or major expansion.

Conduct platform configuration audits on key accounts to catch drift from best practice.

Specify requirements for internal tooling that removes manual implementation work, and partner with Engineering and Product on the roadmap.

Capture implementation friction and feed structured input — including “product debt” — to Product.

Security, compliance and pre-sales (as needed)

Coordinate responses to customer security teams (SSO, custom email domain, ATS and infrastructure questions), liaising with InfoSec and Legal for content — you own the coordination, not the authorship.

Selectively support Sales on technical feasibility, scoping and timelines for complex deals (new ATS types, new regions, large enterprise). This is not a sales engineer role.

Required

5–8+ years in customer-facing technical delivery — ideally HR tech, B2B SaaS, AI products or enterprise software.

A track record of managing complex, multi-stakeholder implementations with concurrent workstreams.

Strong technical fluency — you can hold your own with Engineering, Integrations and customer IT teams without being the builder.

Familiarity with AI tools and the ability to apply them to enhance and automate delivery workflows where it makes sense.

Experience with ATS platforms (Workday, SuccessFactors, PageUp, Greenhouse or similar) strongly preferred.

Strong written communication — you know implementation compounds through documentation.

Comfortable enforcing gates, saying no to incomplete handovers, and holding the line on quality under commercial pressure.

Fluency with a project management toolchain (Jira, Confluence or equivalent).

Strongly preferred

Experience scaling SaaS environments where implementation methodology had to be built or rebuilt.

Exposure to HR / Talent Acquisition functions as customers.

Experience working alongside data science or applied AI teams on customer deliverables.

Familiarity with AI/ML products and their implementation considerations (validation, bias testing, model behaviour, change management for AI adoption).

Change management training or certification.

The mindset that fits

You treat each implementation as a contribution to the next ten, not a one-off project.

You’re comfortable with ambiguity in scope but uncompromising on quality gates.

You have a strong sense of internal-partner accountability — your job is to make everyone else’s job easier.

You have a bias toward documentation, instrumentation and automation.

On-time, in-scope delivery: % of implementations delivered to plan.

Clean handovers: the CSM inherits a complete, documented account — including the change profile — at the 60-day mark.

Adoption stability: at-risk and low-adoption accounts reduced after go-live.

Methodology leverage: playbooks, runbooks and tooling that reduce build time, rework and manual hours over time.

Team enablement: CSMs are confident configuring and supporting the platform they inherit.

Fully remote team.

The chance to work with an amazing, purpose-driven team of hustlers.

A team that works hard and loves to have fun while disrupting the recruitment space.

Training allowance.

We believe there’s more to you than your CV. So, we start with a chat interview, our very own, designed to uncover your potential and give you the space to share who you are in your own words. You’ll answer 5-6 role-relevant questions over chat, and one video question. It’s untimed and mobile-friendly. Afterwards, you’ll get personalised insights from the interview, based on your written responses. Our hiring team will reach out to you directly if they’d like to move forward.