Technical Program Manager (TPM)

Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Job type: Contract
Salary: $95 - 105 per hour
Work hours: 8am to 5pm

About the role

We need a Technical Program Manager (TPM) who is genuinely technical—someone who can sit in a hardware design review, understand the discussion, ask the right questions, and translate complex technical status into clear program-level decisions and risks. This role is for someone comfortable operating in ambiguity, building structure where none exists, and driving alignment across a fast-moving team with multiple workstreams.

Responsibilities

Program Planning & Execution

• Own the integrated program plan for the Boston physical AI team—covering hardware builds, lab operations, validation campaigns, and engineering milestones.
• Maintain and actively manage a living dependency map across onsite and remote engineering teams; identify risks before they become schedule impacts.
• Establish and drive program cadences—sprint planning, milestone reviews, risk reviews, and cross-team syncs—that keep the organization aligned without adding unnecessary overhead.
• Track open action items, decisions, and commitments across workstreams; own follow-through and hold teams accountable to their commitments.

Risk & Decision Management

• Proactively surface technical, schedule, and resource risks; develop and drive mitigation strategies rather than just flagging problems.
• Distinguish between decisions that need leadership visibility and those that can and should be resolved at the team level; create the right escalation pathways.
• Build and maintain program dashboards that give leadership accurate, real-time visibility into status, risks, and blockers—without requiring manual data collection from engineers.
• Facilitate tradeoff discussions when priorities conflict—bringing the right people into the room, structuring the decision, and ensuring clear outcomes are documented.

Cross-Team Alignment

• Serve as the connective tissue between onsite lab and engineering teams and broader organizational stakeholders—translating technical status into program language and vice versa.
• Own communication of program status, risks, and decisions to engineering leadership on a regular and ad-hoc basis.
• Coordinate with external teams—supply chain, facilities, IT, partner engineering organizations—to resolve dependencies that sit outside the immediate team boundary.
• Manage scope changes, new requests, and shifting priorities in a structured way that maintains clarity on what's in-plan and what's not.

Process & Tooling

• Build lightweight but effective program management processes appropriate for a fast-moving R&D environment—not enterprise overhead, but enough structure to prevent chaos.
• Own tooling decisions for program tracking (e.g., Jira, Confluence, Asana, or similar) and drive adoption across the team.
• Author clear RACI frameworks for key workstreams to eliminate ambiguity about who owns what.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• 7+ years of technical program management experience, with at least 3 years managing programs that involve hardware development, physical systems, or robotics.
• Ability to work onsite in Boston, MA.
• Strong technical foundation—enough depth to understand hardware build processes, test and validation workflows, and engineering dependencies without needing every concept explained.
• Demonstrable track record of managing complex, multi-workstream programs in ambiguous or greenfield environments—not just running established processes.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to write a sharp status update, a clean risk register, and a clear decision memo without much editing.
• Experience building program management infrastructure (processes, tools, cadences) from scratch.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a physical AI, robotics, autonomous systems, or advanced hardware R&D organization.
• Exposure to hardware development lifecycles—NPI, prototype builds, DVT/EVT/PVT, or equivalent—and the specific dependencies and failure modes that come with them.
• Familiarity with agile methodologies adapted for hardware development environments.
• Prior experience at a hyperscaler, frontier AI lab, or high-growth technology company where ambiguity and speed are the norm, not the exception.

Skills

• Agile methodologies
• AI
• Asana
• Build processes
• Confluence
• Hardware design
• Hardware development
• Computer Science
• Jira
• Prototype builds
• Sprint planning
• Communication
• Excellent written and verbal communication
• Coordinate
• Leadership
• Proactively
• Autonomous systems
• Dashboards
• Data collection
• DVT
• Editing
• Failure modes
• Infrastructure
• Campaigns
• Memo
• Mitigation strategies
• Program Planning
• Program management processes
• Managing programs
• Program management
• R&D
• Risks
• Risk reviews
• Risk register
• Robotics
• Supply chain
• Technical program management
• Test and validation
• Tooling
• Workflows

Pay

$95 - 105 per hour

Schedule

8am to 5pm