Technical Program Manager – Cluster Build and Operations

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc•Austin, TX

About The Position

The Technical Program Manager serves as the accountable program leader for large-scale compute clusters throughout their lifecycle, from concept, planning, bring-up, and delivery through operational handoff and sustained production service. The role leads and coordinates engineering and operations teams to deliver clusters on schedule and keep them healthy, available, and efficiently utilized. It is a program leadership position, not a hands-on engineering or site reliability role; the manager owns the plan, operating cadence, and outcomes while specialist teams perform technical work. The position partners with technical teams to assess feasibility, define build strategies, sequence dependencies, and execute against program objectives. In production, it owns the operating model and escalation paths, leads cross-functional incident response and root-cause investigations, and ensures issues are resolved through closure. The role requires analytical, problem-solving, and risk-management capability; effective relationship-building and alignment across a complex organization; and comfort working in dynamic environments with cross-functional dependencies and live production constraints. The manager provides executive and operational visibility into build status and fleet health, anticipates and mitigates risks, and drives continuous improvement of build, operations, and administration processes, tools, and automation. The role works with senior leaders across Engineering, Product Management, Customer Engineering, IT, and Program Management to align priorities, risks, and objectives.

Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Formal project management education and PMP, Scrum Master, or equivalent certification or training.
Ability to lead and coordinate cross-functional technical teams through complex, multi-stage cluster bring-up, integration, or infrastructure deployment efforts.
Ability to lead technical debugging discussions and guide engineering teams toward root cause.
Ability to quickly grasp technical concepts and turn meeting discussions into clear, actionable outcomes.
Excellent organizational, analytical, problem-solving, presentation, written, and verbal communication skills.
Ability to manage multiple priorities while maintaining momentum and delivering results.
Ability to build productive relationships, work independently, and drive execution without direct authority in matrixed organizations.
Strong executive communication skills, including program reviews, status reporting, and escalation management.
Demonstrated ability to solve complex cross-organizational problems and mitigate risk at program scale.
Strong proficiency with project and productivity tools, including Microsoft Project, Jira, Confluence, and Microsoft Office Suite applications.

Nice To Haves

Experience building artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) clusters and carrying them into sustained production operation.
Working familiarity with cluster administration, including workload schedulers such as Slurm or Kubernetes, node provisioning and imaging, fabric and interconnect health, and fleet monitoring.
Technical depth sufficient to lead technical discussions and assess trade-offs, without directly administering the cluster.
Experience establishing or managing operational disciplines such as incident and change management, maintenance planning, on-call coverage, and post-incident reviews.
People-management experience.
Experience in Agile development environments.

Responsibilities

Lead cluster bring-up from concept and planning through delivery and operational handoff.
Direct and coordinate cross-functional teams spanning hardware, infrastructure, software, firmware, validation, and site/datacenter operations.
Assess technical feasibility with architects, technical leads, and engineering teams, and clarify requirements and dependencies.
Develop integrated program schedules across hardware, firmware, software, infrastructure, and bring-up dependencies, aligning milestones to delivery objectives.
Lead bring-up debugging by triaging blockers, convening subject-matter experts, and driving fixes to closure before production handoff.
Build, maintain, and execute program plans, including plans of record, statements of work, schedules, scope, budgets, and KPIs.
Define and enforce acceptance criteria and exit gates for release from bring-up into production service.
Own production cluster availability and utilization targets, report performance, and hold responsible engineering and operations teams accountable.
Establish and run fleet operating cadence, including maintenance windows, change management, update campaigns, and scheduled downtime planning.
Establish and manage on-call rotation and escalation coverage, including handoffs, severity definitions, and response-time expectations.
Lead production issue response, conduct post-incident reviews, and track preventive actions through closure.
Partner with datacenter and site operations on power, cooling, cabling, spares, RMA flow, and field service.
Direct fleet capacity planning and lifecycle management, including expansion, re-provisioning, hardware refresh, and decommissioning.
Define monitoring and reporting needed by leadership and work with engineering to address gaps.
Oversee cluster administration, including workload scheduling and queue policy, node and partition configuration, image and software stack management, and onboarding new user teams.
Govern access, entitlement, and quota management in partnership with security and IT.
Establish and maintain runbooks, standard operating procedures, and operational documentation.
Define and track cluster-user support expectations and manage intake and prioritization of user-facing operational requests.
Provide executive and operational visibility into build status and fleet health, and facilitate dependency management and cross-team communication.
Anticipate lifecycle risks, identify mitigation strategies, and proactively address issues that could affect schedules, availability, or engineering resources.
Work with core and execution teams to identify matters requiring escalation and drive them to resolution.
Collect, analyze, organize, and publish build and operational performance data using dashboards, metrics, and recurring status reviews.
Drive continuous improvement of build, operations, and administration processes, tools, and automation to improve throughput, repeatability, and operational efficiency.
Align priorities, risks, and objectives with senior leaders across Engineering, Product Management, Customer Engineering, IT, and Program Management.