Senior Program Manager

Role: Senior Program Manager

Be the “glue” across product, engineering, applied science, design, and customer operations—translating strategy into executable delivery plans and owning whether what the team ships works.

Responsibilities

• Own the program: run sprint cadence, maintain backlog health, and drive delivery discipline across engineering, applied science, and design.
• Translate strategy into plans: define milestones, dependencies, critical paths, and realistic dates.
• Keep the backlog tightly groomed: ensure items are prioritized, sized, and clearly scoped (in/out and rationale).
• Connect the dots & surface tradeoffs: align stakeholders across disciplines so teams aren’t “flying blind.”
• Look ahead: identify hidden dependencies, breaking assumptions, and customer commitments that may collide with the roadmap.
• Make hard calls visible: manage tradeoffs across scope/timeline/quality and decisions like build vs. buy, ship now vs. harden first.
• Drive release readiness & quality:
  • Own the “is this shippable?” signal.
  • Coordinate QA, regression testing, user testing, launch checklists, rollout plans, and rollback criteria.
  • Verify what was built matches what was planned and that end-to-end systems operate as expected.
  • Establish operational rhythm (deploy cadence, incident response, on-call norms) to earn enterprise trust.
  • Decide when to cut scope to ship vs. hold for quality.

Requirements

• Execution: deep experience running complex, multi-functional delivery programs with strong command of sprints, backlogs, roadmaps, dependencies, and rigorous execution.
• Program track record: experience moving early-stage chaos into enterprise-grade repeatability.
• Product judgment: deep product understanding, user empathy, and strong participation in product discussions.
• Technical fluency: ability to work effectively with engineers by asking the right questions and surfacing gaps the team hasn’t addressed yet.
• AI/LLM conceptual grasp: understanding of how AI/LLM systems and real-time infrastructure fail, how to test them, and what “release-ready” means.
• Scientific measurement instrument experience: experience shipping and operating scientific measurement instruments.

Additional Information

• Remote (U.S.)
• Occasional travel for onsite and customer meetings (5–10%).