Technical Program Manager, AI Platform

Lila Sciences•Cambridge, MA

9h•$192,000 - $306,000

About The Position

Lila is building toward scientific superintelligence, and the AI Platform team is responsible for the compute, storage, and tooling that lets researchers train, evaluate, and iterate on increasingly capable models. As the platform scales, the surface area of cross-functional coordination including vendor relationships, governance, utilization, support and observability grows faster than any single engineering team can absorb. We are looking for a Senior or Principal Technical Program Manager to bring structure, accountability, and momentum to that coordination work. You will sit at the center of the AI Platform team's programs and serve as the connective tissue between platform engineering, AI research, vendor partners, and the Lila teams that depend on us. You will drive multi-quarter programs across compute, storage, utilization, support, and evaluation infrastructure, and you must be genuinely curious about how the platform works, being able to clearly articulate what each program is trying to deliver. The successful candidate thrives in ambiguity, communicates exceptionally well across audiences, and knows how to build clarity and momentum on a fast-paced, rapidly scaling team.

Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
8+ years of program or project management experience in technology, infrastructure, or platform engineering organizations.
Proven experience leading multi-workstream platform or infrastructure programs to successful completion across distributed teams.
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to turn technical and operational requirements into actionable roadmaps and metrics.
Track record of driving accountability without direct authority across engineering, research, and vendor stakeholders.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; track record of producing executive-quality documents, roadmaps, and updates that drive decisions.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience in AI/ML research, infrastructure, or platform organizations, ideally driving programs that serve researcher or engineering users.
Working familiarity with compute infrastructure, storage architecture, cluster utilization, or observability tooling, sufficient to engage credibly with platform engineers.
Experience managing strategic vendor relationships and measuring return on partnership investments.
Experience standing up support, UX, or user-feedback programs in technical environments.

Responsibilities

Drive the compute fleet scale-up program: coordinate fleet management upgrades, consolidate governance policies into an actionable framework, and partner teams and leadership to keep governance and capacity-sharing on track.
Lead the unified storage strategy balancing cost, compliance, and researcher workflows; design training and adoption campaigns and stand up a feedback loop from researchers.
Build a systematic cluster utilization program: define the metrics framework, align requirements for observability tooling, engage with teams running under-utilizing workloads, and shape targeted interventions across platform, libraries, training, and documentation.
Own the ML software platform vendor partnership: manage the vendor relationship, ensure the team extracts full value from vendor engineers, and define metrics that demonstrate return on the investment.
Stand up a data-driven researcher support and user experience program: establish visibility into ticket volume, resolution time, and categories; execute on UX improvements; and develop proactive insights into how researchers use the cluster.
Define and build the eval leaderboard program: gather requirements from researchers and stakeholders, shape the leaderboard and dashboard system, and ensure researchers have the guidance to use it effectively.
Maintain structured working relationships with partner teams across Lila; identify, log, and track the cross-team programs that emerge from those collaborations.