Principal Technical Program Management

Axon•Seattle, WA

21h•$181,125 - $289,800

About The Position

As a Principal Technical Program Manager on Axon’s Real-Time Operations team, you will own highly complex, ambiguous technical programs spanning multiple teams and pillars. You will be accountable for program outcomes and partner with product, engineering, and senior leadership from early definition through design, development, deployment, and post-production. You will turn early ideas and unclear problems into executable plans with requirements, milestones, dependencies, and success measures; identify opportunities before requirements exist; build alignment; and drive commitments forward. You will own end-to-end technical requirements and help engineering teams assess architecture and technical trade-offs with scalability, reliability, availability, and long-term maintainability in mind. The team builds, deploys, and maintains products for emergency responders around the Axon Fusus platform, where outages, regressions, or performance degradation can affect customers. The role calls for trusted relationships, accountability, technical credibility with engineers, and executive presence with senior leaders. The position is located in Seattle, reports to the Sr. Director of Technical Program Management, and has no direct reports.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Science, or a related field.
10 or more 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 delivery methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban, and judgment about which approach fits 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 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.
Anticipate, manage, and mitigate risks across teams and pillars.
Track cross-team dependencies, identify opportunities to parallelize work, delegate risk ownership, and establish escalation paths.
Define program success metrics, track 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 data stores, caching, technical stacks, system boundaries, and where business logic should reside.
Lead technical discussions on scalability, reliability, availability, and long-term maintainability.
Guide technical trade-off discussions with leaders using sound technical judgment and sufficient technical depth.
Engage business, legal, information security, and policy stakeholders early.
Own program status and strategy communications 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.
Define and improve reusable TPM artifacts, tools, and mechanisms.
Identify opportunities to use AI to accelerate execution, decision-making, and program management practices.
Mentor TPMs and educate R&D teams on program management practices.
Interview and calibrate candidates for senior TPM, engineering, and leadership roles.
Work effectively with teams across multiple time zones.