Technical Program Manager, Robotic Data & Deliveries
Mecka · San Francisco, CA · 3 wk ago
HybridProject Management$150k–$200k/yrFull-time
About the role
Own the program that turns Mecka’s ego-data pipeline into on-time, at-spec dataset deliveries to frontier AI labs. You will sit at the seam between our ego-data sales & delivery team and the engineering that produces the data — driving delivery execution against customer commitments while iteratively building the tooling, standards, and datasets that let us scale from bespoke drops to a repeatable delivery engine. This is a hands-on, senior IC role. You will be equally comfortable running a delivery schedule with a demanding AI-lab customer, writing a script to reshape a dataset or query a pipeline, and defining the spec that makes the next delivery faster than the last.
Responsibilities
- End-to-End Delivery Program Ownership: Act as the lead program owner for our highest-value ego-data deliveries. Drive cross-functional execution across Sales, Data Operations, Labeling, and Engineering to ship datasets that meet each customer’s spec, volume, and timeline — owning the master delivery schedule and holding contributors accountable to it.
- Delivery Tooling & Automation: Iterate on the tooling that packages, validates, and hands off ego datasets. Prototype and build — scripts, QA checks, packaging and manifest tooling, delivery dashboards — then partner with Engineering to harden what works into durable infrastructure. Every delivery should leave the pipeline faster and more automated than it found it.
- Dataset Quality & Standards: Define and enforce the standards that make an ego dataset "delivery-ready" — completeness, metadata, taxonomy, formatting, and QA gates. Turn recurring delivery pain into reusable specs, checklists, and automated validation so quality is built in, not inspected in.
- Sales & Customer Delivery Partnership: Partner with the ego-data sales & delivery team to translate customer requirements into concrete delivery plans, and translate pipeline realities back into commitments sales can confidently make. Serve as a senior point of contact on delivery scope, status, and escalations for key AI-lab accounts.
- Metrics & Reporting: Build data-driven reporting for the delivery function — time-to-delivery, dataset volume and yield, QA pass rates, rework, and SLA adherence. Use fleet- and pipeline-level data to spot bottlenecks and quality trends before they threaten a delivery.
Requirements
- 2–5+ years as a TPM, Technical Program/Product Lead, or Data/Delivery Operations lead — ideally in ML/AI data, robotics, or another domain shipping complex technical deliverables to sophisticated customers.
- Data Delivery Expertise: Hands-on experience taking large, complex datasets or technical deliverables from an internal pipeline to an external customer at spec and on time — with a real feel for data quality, QA, and the failure modes of a delivery pipeline.
- Senior IC Leadership: Proven ability to lead by influence without direct reports — aligning sales, engineers, and operators around a single delivery schedule and holding them to it in a fast-moving, early-stage environment.
- Systems & Process Mastery: Skilled at configuring workflow and tracking systems (Jira, Asana, Linear, or similar) and building lightweight process and reporting that brings order to chaotic, high-growth scaling environments.
- Customer-Ready Communication: Able to represent Mecka credibly to technical AI-lab customers — clear on scope, status, and trade-offs — while keeping internal teams honest about what can actually ship.
Skills
- Hands-On Technical Acumen: Comfortable in the data yourself — querying databases (e.g., SQL, MongoDB), writing scripts (e.g., Python) to reshape, validate, or QA datasets, and prototyping tooling before handing it to Engineering to productionize. You can read a schema and a telemetry dashboard, not just a status report.
Pay
Compensation Range: $150K - $200K