Technical Program Manager, Physical Infrastructure

DigitalOcean•Seattle, WA

3d•$98,000 - $122,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Technical Program Manager on the Physical Infrastructure team, you will drive value delivery for a set of technical programs and special projects that bring our cloud and AI infrastructure to life, spanning data center build-outs, hardware deployment, capacity across our global fleet, and the operational initiatives that keep it all running. This individual will be a cross-functional collaborator who champions continuous improvement and thrives in a fast-paced environment, applying technical literacy along with relevant experience to navigate delivering on commitments. In this role, you will partner with Product, Engineering, and infrastructure teams to drive the delivery of valuable technical programs that scale our agentic inference cloud and meet our customers' heavy compute needs. You will connect the work across the internal teams and outside vendors that get infrastructure online, embodying servant leadership to ensure efficient, effective value delivery. You will be a proactive collaborator while driving consensus where needed and influencing decisions when teams are stuck. A real part of this job is the steady, behind-the-scenes work of keeping people on track: following up, closing loops, and making sure commitments made in a meeting still hold down the line. You'll bring a growth mindset to all of it, prioritizing learning and improvement for yourself and the teams you work with, communicating the "why" behind change, and building learning cycles into how the team works. At any given time, you may be working on projects ranging in variety from brand new hardware deployments, to new hiring and onboarding initiatives; from a Finance partnership in need of critical infrastructure context, to an expansion of datacenter capacity.

Requirements

Experience keeping cross-functional work on track in a fast-paced environment: planning it, spotting what's about to slip, resolving what blocks it, and driving it to done. You don't need to have held the "Technical Program Manager" title; we're interested in people who've done this work under other names, including project or delivery management, data center or deployment operations, facilities or construction project management, supply chain or capacity planning, and technical business operations
Personable yet persistent, with authentic interpersonal interactions. You're comfortable being the person who follows up, and follows up again, without wearing out your welcome
An understanding of what qualifies as a risk, and how to capture and manage risks appropriately for your team
Ability to identify and clearly state problems that arise within your team, think critically about the stated need versus the underlying cause, gather necessary data, and to suggest and help implement solutions
Ability to distill complex or technical concepts into clear, structured communications and action plans, balancing a detail- and process-oriented mindset with a focus on outcomes
Excellent written and verbal communication and facilitation skills: building productive relationships and managing expectations, looking for areas of agreement, and hearing the concerns that go unvoiced
Ability to influence and work through others where direct reporting relationships do not exist, acting as a bridge between deeply technical teams and operational teams
Comfortable using AI tools to take the toil out of your daily work, whether drafting and tightening status communications, summarizing long threads and meetings, or synthesizing scattered information into a clear picture

Nice To Haves

Experience in physical infrastructure, hardware, facilities, or data center environments
Familiarity with the infrastructure context: data center and hardware fundamentals such as rack space, power, cooling, and deployment workflows; the procurement lifecycle and its long lead times; and the basics of the AI/ML hardware space, including why customers use GPUs and the high-level difference between training and inference. Depth in all of these isn't expected
Experience with project management tooling (e.g., the Atlassian suite/Jira and Confluence), including creating and updating items, dashboards and basic querying, and building roadmaps

Responsibilities

Drive value delivery across your assigned programs and special projects, including prioritization, planning, risk management, execution, and measurement of success. You'll own delivery of your programs and deliverables with guidance from your manager and senior TPMs, and lead defined workstreams on larger, more complex programs
Partner with Product, Engineering, and infrastructure leads throughout the life of the program on value delivery and process/practice improvements
Keep supply chain, facilities, hardware engineering, colocation providers, remote hands, and internal networking teams informed and aligned on the schedules for your programs, coordinating the steps from site and capacity planning through deployment
Build relationships within and across teams to lead stakeholders toward a common goal; facilitate team and cross-functional meetings that foster decision-making across multiple teams and locations, and help your team prioritize work
Communicate clearly and often about program requirements, timelines, objectives, status, risks, technical concepts, and process, so that expectations are understood and supported by both internal and external stakeholders
Own the follow-through on your programs: tracking commitments across teams and vendors, checking in before a date slips, and closing the loop on open questions and decisions so nothing falls through the cracks
Help your team identify, capture, and manage risks, recognizing risk early, whether a delayed hardware shipment or a facility constraint, and forming mitigation plans as required
Proactively manage changes in scope and priority shifts, and aid in resolving impediments, conflicts, and competing priorities for your team and across teams, working unplanned issues to resolution with support as appropriate
Suggest improvements to team processes and help implement the repeatable ways of working (and the visibility behind them) that get infrastructure online faster and improve reliability