Program Manager

Emerson•Austin, TX

About The Position

We are seeking a senior technical leader to help advance NI’s Software Community Program by strengthening our engagement with customers, developers, technical communities, and other influential members of the NI ecosystem. This individual will serve as a visible and credible technical representative of NI software—helping customers understand our software strategy and direction, building stronger relationships across the engineering community, and creating engagement that increases advocacy, participation, and confidence in the NI software platform. The role combines deep technical expertise, community engagement, technical communication, and relationship development. It is not a product management role, although the insights gained through close engagement with customers and the community will help inform NI’s strategy and priorities.

Requirements

Significant professional software engineering experience, ideally including experience designing, developing, or architecting complex software systems.
Deep understanding of modern software engineering practices, development workflows, and software architecture.
Strong familiarity with technologies and practices such as AI-assisted software development, CI/CD, DevOps, automation, containers, APIs, and open-source software.
Ability to rapidly develop deep technical knowledge of NI software, its architecture, and the engineering workflows it supports.
Exceptional written, verbal, and presentation skills.
Experience presenting complex technical topics to engineering audiences.
Ability to create technical demonstrations, prototypes, examples, or other hands-on assets.
Experience working directly with customers, developer communities, partners, or other external technical audiences.
Ability to communicate effectively with both highly technical contributors and senior business or engineering leaders.
Strong cross-functional collaboration skills and the ability to influence without direct authority.
Willingness to travel regularly for customer engagements, community activities, and industry events.

Nice To Haves

Experience participating in or contributing to developer communities, open-source projects, technical conferences, user groups, or similar communities is highly desirable.
Familiarity with NI software, automated test, measurement, engineering systems, or adjacent technical domains is highly desirable.

Responsibilities

Serve as a highly credible technical representative of NI within customer and developer communities.
Engage directly with customers through technical meetings, site visits, workshops, user groups, conferences, industry events, and other forums.
Communicate NI’s software strategy, technical direction, roadmap, and key messages to highly technical audiences.
Explain and demonstrate how NI software supports modern engineering practices, including AI-assisted development, CI/CD, automation, containers, open source, and emerging software workflows.
Develop and deliver technical presentations, demonstrations, prototypes, examples, and other content that make NI’s software strategy tangible.
Participate directly in online and in-person engineering communities, answering questions, contributing technical perspective, and representing NI appropriately.
Build relationships with influential users who can become advocates, contributors, early adopters, partners, and strategic collaborators.
Support programs involving Champions, user groups, developer engagement, open source, technical content, customer advocacy, and other community initiatives.
Identify opportunities for deeper collaboration with customers and community members, including early-access programs, open-source initiatives, technical partnerships, and co-innovation.
Work with R&D, Product, Marketing, Sales, and other internal teams to ensure community engagement is aligned with NI’s broader software strategy.
Equip other customer-facing teams with technical messaging, demonstrations, examples, and expertise that help them represent NI’s software strategy effectively.
Bring meaningful community perspectives, technical trends, customer concerns, and emerging practices back into NI.