Principal Tech Program Manager, Alexa AI - AI Runtime

About the role

The Alexa AI Runtime (AIR) organization is the runtime backbone and horizontal intelligence team that powers Alexa+ AI capabilities. We own the harness that connects to state‑of‑the‑art LLMs across spoken language, visual, and text modalities, and we build the runtime systems that turn customer experiences into reality through those models. We partner closely with the science teams applying the latest techniques to build, evaluate, and continuously improve AI‑based experiences. The Principal Technical Program Manager will drive delivery of our most complex, cross‑organizational programs spanning the full runtime orchestration stack, from input to agent reasoning to task execution to response. This role operates with a high degree of independence across VP organizations, defining program strategy, driving clarity where none exists, and making trade‑offs between business opportunity, resource allocation, and long‑term sustainability.

Responsibilities

• Define and own very large programs spanning multiple engineering and science teams, product organizations, and VP orgs, driving cross‑functional alignment on AIR’s most critical runtime and platform initiatives.
• Operate in deep ambiguity where business and architectural strategy may not yet be defined, driving clarity and creating the path forward.
• Identify risks and opportunities in technical strategies, runtime architectures, and engineering organization structures, influencing decision‑makers at the VP level.
• Make strategic trade‑offs between business opportunity, resource allocation, and system sustainability while remediating critical and endemic problems in a horizontal, mission‑critical system.
• Force‑multiply across the AIR organization by accelerating delivery, managing escalations, and aligning teams toward simple, coherent approaches.
• Coordinate delivery across the Platform, Task, and Agents layers and the Central Evaluation and Testing (CET) platform used for offline model and CX evaluation.
• Own end‑to‑end program strategy for AIR’s most complex cross‑organizational initiatives, spanning runtime orchestration, agent reasoning, task execution, and locale expansion.
• Drive technical architecture discussions with Principal Engineers, SDMs, and Principal Scientists, identifying dependencies, scaling factors, boundary conditions, and risks across horizontal distributed systems serving AI inference at global scale.
• Represent and advocate for customers during executive‑level prioritization and planning, balancing long‑term versus short‑term technical decisions through design, build, and launch.
• Create strong mechanisms and cross‑org structures that streamline program management, facilitate coordination, and align teams toward coherent delivery approaches, providing SVP/VP‑level updates on a recurring cadence.
• Identify and resolve roadblocks and conflicts that arise during execution, partnering with product, science, and engineering teams to unblock and drive resolution in a matrix organization with tight timelines.
• Actively develop the TPM community through mentorship, promotion assessments, and defining program‑management best practices that raise the execution bar across the organization.

Basic qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience.
• 7+ years of technical product or program management experience.
• 5+ years of software development experience.
• Experience managing programs across cross‑functional teams, building processes and coordinating release schedules.
• Experience owning/driving roadmap strategy and definition.
• Experience leading complex programs with significant change impact across organizational boundaries.

Preferred qualifications

• 8+ years of hands‑on work managing complex technology projects.
• Experience managing projects across cross‑functional teams, building sustainable processes and coordinating release schedules.
• Experience in machine learning, data mining, information retrieval, statistics, or natural language processing, or experience developing and deploying LLMs in production on GPUs, Neuron, TPU, or other AI acceleration hardware.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription).
• Basic Life & AD&D insurance with optional supplemental life plans.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and mental health support.
• Medical advice line.
• Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Adoption and surrogacy reimbursement coverage.
• 401(k) matching.
• Paid time off.
• Parental leave.
• Sign‑on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs) as part of the compensation package.

Pay

Salary range: $177,000 – $239,400 USD annually (USA, WA, Bellevue). Compensation includes sign‑on payments and RSUs and is determined based on experience, qualifications, and location.