Staff Technical Program Manager, Developer Productivity, DevOps, Infrastructure & Cloud Platforms

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies•Irvine, CA

About The Position

As a Staff Technical Program Manager on the Developer Productivity, DevOps & Cloud Platform team, you will lead complex, cross-functional programs that improve how our engineers build, deploy, operate, and continuously improve software. You will operate with a high degree of initiative and independent judgment. You will be the connective tissue between our DevOps and internal tooling teams, infrastructure and cloud leaders, engineering organizations, and partners across the company and external brands. Your work will create clarity where ownership is distributed, turn ambiguous problems into executable plans, and help teams make durable improvements to the systems and practices they rely on every day. This role spans three connected program spaces: Product-oriented programs, including internal and external customer-facing tools and AI-enhanced workflows; Platform-focused programs, including infrastructure, cloud services, developer platforms, build systems, CI/CD, and operational tooling; and Internal-facing programs, including systems and tools that improve the way our engineers use data and AI, accelerate software development workflows, and strengthen incident response and learning. You will be expected to flex across all three areas, often within the same program. The strongest candidates combine program-management rigor with enough technical fluency to earn the trust of engineers, understand system and operational tradeoffs, and help leaders make informed decisions without taking ownership away from the teams doing the work.

Requirements

5+ years of progressive experience in technical project and/or program management, engineering program management, product operations, engineering operations, or a related field.
Experience leading complex, cross-functional programs involving software engineering, infrastructure, cloud, DevOps, developer tools, or production operations.
Strong technical fluency in modern software delivery and operations, such as CI/CD, build systems, cloud infrastructure, observability, distributed systems, service ownership, or incident response.
Demonstrated ability to lead through influence across multiple teams and organizational boundaries.
Experience operating effectively in ambiguous environments where the path, ownership model, or solution is not yet defined.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to tailor technical and program narratives to engineers, executives, and external partners.
A track record of identifying systemic problems, establishing a clear operating model, and delivering measurable improvement.
Sound judgment about when to create structure, when to move quickly, and when to escalate.
Strong team player known for building trust and partnering across functional lines.
Comfort using metrics, dashboards, operational data, and qualitative feedback to guide decisions.
A bias toward action, learning, and continuous improvement.
Willingness and enthusiasm to use AI tools as part of day-to-day program management work (not just programs about AI).

Nice To Haves

Experience with large-scale developer productivity, platform engineering, SRE, DevOps transformation, or cloud modernization programs.
Experience leading incident-management or operational-excellence transformations across an enterprise.
Experience working with AI and data platforms or enabling AI-assisted engineering workflows.
Experience working across a technology company, automotive organization, or other complex product and platform environment.
Experience partnering with external customers, brands, suppliers, or strategic technology partners.
Familiarity with program and portfolio tools, engineering metrics, service-management practices, and modern product-development methods.

Responsibilities

Lead multi-team technical programs from problem definition through delivery, adoption, and measurable business or engineering outcomes.
Establish program strategy, scope, milestones, dependencies, decision forums, operating cadence, and success metrics.
Partner with DevOps, infrastructure, cloud, security, data, AI, and engineering leaders to align priorities and sequence work across organizational boundaries.
Drive improvements from incident management, including incident readiness, severity and escalation models, communications, command structures, post-incident learning, and follow-through on corrective actions.
Coordinate programs that improve reliability and speed across build, test, release, deployment, observability, and production operations.
Translate technical complexity into clear decisions, risks, tradeoffs, and actions for both engineering and executive audiences.
Identify gaps in ownership, process, architecture, or operating mechanisms and create practical paths to resolution.
Use data and operational signals to understand program health, expose systemic issues, and measure whether improvements are working.
Build alignment across teams with different incentives, priorities, and levels of technical context.
Influence without direct authority by creating clarity, building trust, surfacing issues early, and holding teams accountable to agreed outcomes.
Represent the program in leadership reviews and provide concise, decision-oriented status updates.
Improve the way we run programs by developing reusable mechanisms, templates, metrics, and working practices that scale beyond a single initiative.