Principal Technical Program Manager (Product Operations)

Gather AI • Pittsburgh, PA

2h

About The Position

Most program management roles ask you to run a process someone else already built. This one asks you to build it. As Principal Technical Program Manager, you'll design the operating system for how a growing robotics company plans, prioritizes, and delivers, starting from scratch and scaling it across every engineering team.
This is a high-visibility, Principal-level individual contributor role reporting into engineering leadership, with the scope to shape processes across the entire org and the option to grow into building out a broader program management function over time.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience with hardware or hardware-plus-software systems
• 10 years of combined engineering and technical program leadership experience, with a track record driving complex hardware, robotics, or ML-based programs. Ideal candidates may have started in engineering and transitioned into program management, so deep program management experience across the entire career is not required
• A track record standing up prioritization frameworks that force explicit trade-offs, not just a stack-ranked backlog, ideally at a scaling startup or through an equivalent 0-to-1 effort within a larger company
• Experience mapping cross-functional dependencies, supporting capacity planning, and establishing operating cadences from scratch, including status readouts, escalation paths, and post-mortems
• Ability to engage deeply with engineering teams, validate estimates, and drive alignment between technical execution and business objectives, with exposure to robotics, drones, computer vision, or edge and embedded hardware
• Strong command of tools like Jira or Linear, translating requirements into clear milestones and roadmap plans, with working familiarity with a major cloud platform like AWS or Azure

Nice To Haves

• Experience with deployment or field-operations programs, including physical installs, supply chain, or hardware procurement
• Background in agile or lean process facilitation and change management
• PMP certification

Responsibilities

• Design and roll out a program-tracking system across concurrent R&D programs, with clear owners, milestones, and risk visibility
• Build a prioritization framework that makes trade-offs explicit whenever new customer-driven scope arrives
• Map cross-team dependencies across hardware, ML, and software before they become blockers
• Establish a standard escalation and post-mortem rhythm for customer go-lives, with a single named owner for each program
• Own the prioritization and roadmap operating cadence across R&D
• Drive deployment-efficiency and configuration-management improvements with Customer Success

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed