Technical Program Manager

Lumbra•Arlington, VA

8d•Hybrid

About The Position

Lumbra is building Nebula, an agentic harness that turns days of analytical work into minutes, now live on JWICS and inside the most classified environments across the Intelligence Community and Department of War. We've won the contracts and proven the platform. The hard part is what comes next: delivering it on schedule, inside facilities where the data can't leave the room and you can't pull a fix from the internet. That's the job. As Technical Program Manager, Delivery & Operations, you own the path from signed contract to a platform analysts depend on every day. You run the deployments and you build the operational backbone that makes the next one faster than the last. You are the person who turns a hard deadline, a disconnected network, and three engineering teams into a working system at the customer's site, on time, with no surprises. This role is hands-on and travel-forward: roughly 50% of your time on-site at deployment locations, currently Florida, Europe, and Hawaii, expanding as our footprint grows. You take ownership like a founder, design systems like an architect, and execute like a product manager. This role requires an active U.S. security clearance (TS/SCI) and U.S. citizenship.

Requirements

7+ years in technical program management, delivery, or product/business operations, with direct ownership of complex programs from plan to delivery, ideally at a high-growth technology company
A track record of shipping under hard deadlines and real constraints. You are measured by what got delivered, not by how clean the board looked
Proven ability to design systems and processes that let technical teams move with clarity and velocity, and the instinct to build the machine rather than do the work twice
Technical fluency to engage credibly with engineers on cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and deployment pipelines, and to reason independently about dependencies and risk
Exceptional analytical judgment: you dig into the data, reason from first principles, and decide without waiting to be told
Willingness and ability to travel ~50%, including to classified sites currently in Florida, Europe, and Hawaii
Active TS/SCI clearance, with the ability to operate in SCIFs and on air-gapped networks without personal devices
U.S. citizenship

Nice To Haves

Experience delivering programs into DoD or IC environments: period-of-performance management, acceptance criteria, contract vehicles, and government compliance overhead
Familiarity with classified and air-gapped deployment realities: ATO, FedRAMP, IL4/IL5/IL6, STIG/SSP documentation, or cross-domain transfer
Experience delivering AI/ML or agentic products, with a feel for the operational realities of non-deterministic systems, evaluation, and model integration
Background coordinating deployments on Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (GCP, GovCloud, or equivalent), with enough CI/CD, Helm, and GitOps understanding to see risk coming
Fluency with modern knowledge-management and project-tracking tools, and the judgment to choose tooling that works across connected and disconnected environments
Background in intelligence, defense, or analytical tooling that informs real empathy for the mission and the end user
A bias toward autonomy: comfortable making consequential decisions in constrained environments without constant direction

Responsibilities

Delivery, end to end. You turn a signed period of performance into a sequenced plan and drive it from kickoff to operational acceptance. When a milestone is at risk, you know before anyone else, and you've already moved to fix it.
Onsite deployments where there's no margin for error. You coordinate air-gapped delivery with cleared engineers, sequence build-and-deploy windows, and make sure every prerequisite is in place before anyone gets on a plane. In a SCIF, a forgotten config file isn't a quick patch, it's a wasted trip across the country or the world. You don't forget.
The single source of truth across engineering, product, and infrastructure. You hold the whole picture, surface the critical path, and unblock people instead of just reporting on them. You have the technical depth to reason about a Kubernetes rollout, a Temporal workflow, or a data connector without needing it translated.
The operational backbone. You build the tracking, staffing, and reporting systems that give leadership and customers one honest view of program health, risk, and cadence, replacing heroics with a machine that scales.
A repeatable playbook. Every deployment teaches you something; you capture it. The second deployment in a region is faster than the first, and the tenth is routine, because you turned hard-won lessons into runbooks and process instead of letting them live in someone's head.
The relationship with the customer. You are Lumbra's face to government program offices and end users, building trust with skeptical audiences, managing expectations with candor, and carrying mission reality back to the team, all without moving classified content across boundaries.
The business mechanics of delivery. You partner with Finance and Legal to keep procurement, budgeting, and contracts from slowing the work, and you track spend and revenue recognition against milestones so delivery and the books stay aligned.
Force-multiplying leadership. You anticipate what leadership needs before they ask, prepare the materials, communicate the priorities, and lead internal enablement that sharpens how the whole team builds and ships.

Benefits

Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans
Premiums 100% covered by Lumbra for all employees
Exceptionally low premiums for spouses and dependents
Basic life insurance and disability 100% covered for all employees by Lumbra
Option to purchase additional life insurance available
Take the time off that you need, when you need it' paid time off, not accrual based
Generous company holiday calendar including a holiday shutdown in December
Supportive leave of absence program including time off for military service, medical events, and parental leave
Full 401(k) retirement plan for all full-time eligible employees
Company-funded commuter benefits
Free access to on-site gym at office