Senior Technical Program Manager, Robotics

Lila Sciences•Cambridge, MA

1d•$192,000 - $238,000

About The Position

You will be the program owner for Physical AI — the shared infrastructure our autonomous labs run on. Working across multiple engineering teams, you'll turn the platform roadmap into a sequenced, dependency-aware plan, own the reliability and scalability programs — SLOs, launch readiness, capacity planning — and be the clear line to the teams who depend on the platform. This is an influence-without-authority role: your leverage comes from rigor, judgment, and trust.

Requirements

Platform program management: 4–8 years of technical program management for platform or infrastructure software across multiple teams.
Dependency & risk mastery: managing cross-team dependencies, critical paths, and risk registers on multi-quarter programs.
Reliability fluency: hands-on with SLOs, launch readiness, capacity planning, or release/incident processes.
Technical credibility: enough depth to engage backend, platform/SRE, and QA engineers on real trade-offs.
Influence without authority: proven ability to drive delivery and hard decisions across teams you don't manage.
Clear communication: you translate fluidly between engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Systems engineering & regulated-industry programs: a systems-thinking background and program experience in regulated, safety-critical domains — aerospace, manufacturing, or healthcare/life sciences. Exposure to validation/V&V regimes (GAMP 5 / FDA CSA, DO-178C) or enterprise-to-shop-floor integration (ISA-95) a plus.
Scientific or lab-automation context: robotics, hardware-in-the-loop, or lab/scientific computing environments.
SRE-adjacent depth: observability, on-call, and incident management practice.
Data-platform exposure: programs spanning data pipelines, capacity/cost planning, or ML/AI infrastructure.

Responsibilities

Drive the Physical AI Platform roadmap: sequence delivery across teams, with clear milestones and owners.
Coordinate cross-team dependencies: map the critical path, surface blockers, and unblock work before it slips.
Own reliability & scalability programs: stand up SLOs, launch-readiness reviews, and capacity planning.
Track risk end to end: maintain a living risk register and drive incident follow-through to closure.
Align stakeholders: keep the teams who depend on the platform current on scope and trade-offs.
Coordinate releases: run release and change coordination so launches are predictable.
Raise operational rigor: establish the rituals — status, escalation paths, decision records — that keep delivery honest.