Principal Technical Program Management

Axon•Seattle, WA

About The Position

As a Principal Technical Program Manager on Axon’s Real-Time Operations team, you will own highly complex, ambiguous technical programs that span multiple teams and pillars. You will be accountable for program outcomes and act as a trusted partner to product, engineering, and senior leadership. Working with engineering and product management, you will guide programs from inception through design, development, deployment, and post-production, turning early ideas into executable plans with clear requirements, milestones, dependencies, and success measures. The role calls for identifying problems and opportunities before requirements are defined, creating structure and alignment across teams, and driving commitments forward. You will own end-to-end technical requirements, help engineering teams assess architectural trade-offs, and keep scalability, reliability, availability, and long-term maintainability in view. The Real-Time Operations team builds, deploys, and maintains products for emergency responders around the Axon Fusus platform, where outages, regressions, or performance degradation can have immediate customer impact. The ideal candidate builds trusted relationships across a wide range of personalities, holds teams accountable for commitments, and brings both technical credibility with engineers and executive presence with senior leaders. The role is based in Seattle and reports to the Sr. Director of Technical Program Management. It has no direct reports.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Science, or a related field.
10+ years of experience managing complex software or hardware/software delivery.
2 to 3 years of experience as a technical individual contributor, engineer, or equivalent hands-on technical role, or comparable technical depth developed through a career.
Record of leading large, cross-team or cross-pillar technical programs with significant ambiguity and executive visibility.
Deep technical judgment and ability to evaluate end-to-end designs, identify risks in technical decisions, and engage credibly with senior engineers.
Strong command of program management practices, including multiple delivery methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban, and judgment to select an approach appropriate to the problem.
Proven ability to manage risks, dependencies, milestones, and status reporting across complex programs.
Experience advising product and engineering leaders and presenting program strategy to senior leadership.
Ability to work through ambiguity, define problems, and establish direction before complete requirements exist.
Strong influencing and interpersonal skills, including mentoring, coaching, and building consensus among stakeholders who may disagree.
Strong written and verbal communication skills.
Experience working across multiple time zones and distributed teams.
Connection to Axon's values and its mission to tackle public safety's biggest challenges.

Nice To Haves

Master's or PhD degree.
Experience with enterprise SaaS or other mission-critical software.

Responsibilities

Own highly complex technical programs across teams and pillars, from strategy and early definition through launch and post-production.
Translate ambiguous business and technical problems into requirements, plans, milestones, dependencies, and measurable outcomes.
Own program plans, schedules, resourcing, and change management, and hold teams accountable for committed deliverables.
Foresee, manage, and mitigate risks across teams and pillars.
Track cross-team dependencies, identify opportunities to parallelize work, delegate risk ownership, and create clear escalation paths.
Define program success metrics, measure progress, and communicate results to leadership.
Own end-to-end technical requirements and bring engineering teams together on system design and architecture.
Help teams evaluate technical decisions involving data stores, caching, technical stacks, system boundaries, and where business logic should live.
Lead technical discussions focused on scalability, reliability, availability, and long-term maintainability.
Drive technical trade-off discussions with leaders using sound technical judgment and sufficient technical depth.
Partner early with business, legal, information security, and policy stakeholders to position programs for long-term success.
Own status and strategy communication for programs and present at MBRs and senior review forums.
Advise product and engineering directors and VPs on program risks, sequencing, dependencies, and execution strategy.
Build and improve architecture, process, and program documentation needed to advance complex programs.
Define and improve reusable TPM artifacts, tools, and mechanisms across teams.
Identify opportunities to use AI to accelerate execution, decision-making, and program management practices.
Mentor TPMs and educate teams across R&D on strong program management practices.
Interview and calibrate candidates for senior TPM, engineering, and leadership roles.
Work effectively with teams across multiple time zones.