Senior Technical Program Manager

Planet•Arlington, VA

19d•$142,800 - $178,500•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Technical Program Manager (TPM) at Planet, you will drive Planet’s largest, complex efforts that cross many teams and organizational boundaries. You will act as an accelerant, focusing on illuminating the path for teams and owning the predictability of execution through the product lifecycle. You will work closely with team leads to develop and manage end to end program plans. This includes establishing and managing internal processes, schedules, metrics, risks, and clearly communicating them to project stakeholders. This role is focused on Planet’s Insights Platform development. This includes leading the technical programs that power how customers find, process, and stream our data. You will focus on building new experiences to discover what is in our catalog and scaling the high-performance services that deliver data and insights directly to user applications.

Requirements

6+ years of software development or program management experience in the areas of SaaS, complex data lifecycles, discovery/search engines, or cloud-based content delivery.
Bachelor's degree in a relevant field.
Experience leading cross-functional projects across a broad organization.
Experience with the product lifecycle: concept through development, launch preparation, go-to-market, deprecations, and end-of-life.
Experience optimizing cross-team delivery cycles and establishing predictable execution patterns within a matrixed engineering organization.
Experience coordinating high-stakes technical programs across global timezones, with a focus on building asynchronous workflows and healthy decision-making cultures.
Track record of managing system migrations or service consolidations, specifically moving from fragmented legacy tools to unified platform endpoints.
Analytical, problem-solving, and creative thinking skills paired with the ability to communicate findings and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Ability to balance the tactical day-to-day with forward-looking improvements to scale operational efficiencies.
Actively explores AI technologies to automate workflows, improve data, or enhance team productivity.

Nice To Haves

Experience with remote sensing, earth observation data, or geospatial systems.
Experience working with remote, worldwide teams.
A desire to improve processes, tools, and ways of working to scale development cycles.
A growth mindset and a desire to learn quickly.

Responsibilities

Work with functions such as Product Managers, Tech Leads, Engineering Managers, Design, Data Science, and other Technical Program Managers.
Drive product and engineering roadmap execution and delivery.
Translate Product and Engineering inputs into realistic, capacity-checked timelines and reconcile commitments across teams to surface and resolve conflicts.
Work closely with engineering to ensure product and design requirements are implemented to scope.
Create and manage program schedules and break those into incremental, visible milestones with definitions of done.
Manage relationship, scope and approve work for external contract integration software developers.
Continuously identify dependencies and risks, and work with stakeholders to make them actionable while still small.
Facilitate decision making and healthy escalation through data-driven analysis and constructive debate.
Communicate vertically & horizontally across business and technical teams to keep stakeholders informed of progress, priorities, risks, and changes to requirements or plans.
Drive for results by continuously improving ways of working and processes, now and for the future.