[Hiring] Principal Technical Program Manager @Gather AI

Role Description

As Principal Technical Program Manager, you'll design the operating system for how a growing robotics company plans, prioritizes, and delivers, starting from scratch and scaling it across every engineering team.

This is a high-visibility, Principal-level individual contributor role reporting into engineering leadership, with the scope to shape processes across the entire org and the option to grow into building out a broader program management function over time.

What You'll Do

• Design and roll out a program-tracking system across concurrent R&D programs, with clear owners, milestones, and risk visibility.
• Build a prioritization framework that makes trade-offs explicit whenever new customer-driven scope arrives.
• Map cross-team dependencies across hardware, ML, and software before they become blockers.
• Establish a standard escalation and post-mortem rhythm for customer go-lives, with a single named owner for each program.
• Own the prioritization and roadmap operating cadence across R&D.
• Drive deployment-efficiency and configuration-management improvements with Customer Success.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with hardware or hardware-plus-software systems.
• 10 years of combined engineering and technical program leadership experience, with a track record driving complex hardware, robotics, or ML-based programs.
• A track record standing up prioritization frameworks that force explicit trade-offs, ideally at a scaling startup or through an equivalent 0-to-1 effort within a larger company.
• Experience mapping cross-functional dependencies, supporting capacity planning, and establishing operating cadences from scratch.
• Ability to engage deeply with engineering teams, validate estimates, and drive alignment between technical execution and business objectives.
• Strong command of tools like Jira or Linear, translating requirements into clear milestones and roadmap plans.

Requirements

• Exposure to robotics, drones, computer vision, or edge and embedded hardware.
• Working familiarity with a major cloud platform like AWS or Azure.

Nice to Have

• Experience with deployment or field-operations programs, including physical installs, supply chain, or hardware procurement.
• Background in agile or lean process facilitation and change management.
• PMP certification.