Senior/Staff Technical Program Manager - Core Autonomy Capabilities

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Own the outcome for each capability. Drive programs from architecture through the release that ships them, and define what "done" means when completion criteria are still being established.
• Partner with the TPMs who own individual capabilities. Set a consistent bar for how their programs are planned and reported, and unblock what they cannot resolve at their level.
• Make dependencies visible before they compress the schedule. These programs discover unknowns mid-flight; surface them early so leadership makes trade-offs explicitly rather than absorbing them invisibly in execution.
• Be the primary point of contact for milestone and executive leadership, synthesizing status across programs into one view and running reviews that produce decisions rather than status.
• Arbitrate scope during planning cycles. Prioritize and staff the portfolio with engineering and product leaders, expose what is unfunded, and bring priced options instead of open questions.
• Execute without a playbook. Launching capabilities that have never shipped before is uncharted territory — engage deeply in technical trade-offs, and bring creative alternatives when the ideal solution isn't available.

Job requirements

• BS or MS degree in an engineering discipline or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of experience in engineering, program management, or management consulting with a focus on product development and success in leading complex cross-functional technical programs from start to finish.
• Experience in autonomy, robotics, or another complex safety-critical domain, with the technical depth to follow architectural trade-offs and validation results.
• Proven ability to influence without authority across organizational boundaries.
• Comfortable leading through ambiguity and enabling teams to perform in this environment.
• Excellent written, presentation, and verbal communication skills.
• Proficient in using program management tools such as Jira.
• Experience taking a novel capability from research or prototype into production.