Principal Technical Program Manager

Hayden AI•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

The Principal Technical Program Manager will own cross-functional visibility and delivery accountability across Hayden’s full engineering and business portfolio. Working directly with executive leadership and business partners across Engineering, Growth, Finance, and Operations, this role translates competing business commitments into a coherent, executable plan, holding the line when capacity and demand diverge. They operate across the full technical stack: hardware, embedded software, edge AI, cloud, computer vision, fleet systems, and government deployment - fluent enough in each domain to surface the right risks and drive the right conversations.

Requirements

B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in an engineering discipline
12+ years in Technical Program Management, Engineering Program Management, or a related role
Demonstrated track record managing a portfolio of concurrent, cross-functional programs in a fast-moving environment
Experience navigating business-engineering tension: translating contracts, revenue commitments, or customer obligations into engineering capacity and sequencing decisions
Technical fluency across multiple domains — enough to engage credibly with hardware, embedded, cloud, and AI engineering teams without domain specialists present
Strong executive communication skills: structured, direct, and able to distill complex program status into clear decisions

Nice To Haves

Experience with on-vehicle, edge-deployed, or ruggedized systems (hardware, embedded, edge AI)
Background in computer vision, autonomous systems, robotics, or AI/ML programs
Experience delivering technology to government or municipal clients (procurement cycles, compliance requirements, deployment constraints)
Familiarity with fleet management, secure transaction systems, or sensor hardware platforms
Experience in a high-growth startup or scale-up environment where process didn’t exist before you built it

Responsibilities

Portfolio Governance: Own the company-level program portfolio — maintaining a single source of truth for commitments, capacity, dependencies, and status across all active lines of work.
Business-Engineering Translation: Serve as the primary interface between executive leadership and engineering teams, translating business commitments (contracts, growth targets, customer deployments) into engineering capacity plans and surfacing tradeoffs before they become misses.
Executive Reporting: Design and maintain the dashboards, cadences, and reporting frameworks that give the senior leadership clear, accurate visibility into portfolio health without noise.
Capacity Planning & Demand Management: Partner with engineering leads across Hardware, Perception, Platform/Cloud, and Eng Ops to maintain a real-time view of capacity versus committed demand, and drive prioritization decisions when they conflict.
Cross-Functional Program Delivery: Drive end-to-end delivery of strategic programs that span multiple engineering pillars and business functions, including customer-facing deployments, new product launches, and operational scaling initiatives.

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