Senior Technical Program Manager – Autonomy
HybridAustin, Texas, United States
Austin, Texas, United StatesHybridFull TimeSenior LevelSmall
Full TimeSenior LevelSmall
Job Summary
Lead requirement intake and refinement for autonomy capabilities, translating mission intent into clear, testable engineering requirements with full traceability from initiative to acceptance criteria. Own sprint ceremonies, backlog refinement, and status reporting in Jira while managing cross-team dependencies across Autonomy, Core, Systems, and Release Engineering. Enforce scope discipline through explicit change-control processes and maintain rigorous Jira hygiene conventions to ensure the system of record remains reliable. Produce concise technical briefs to drive program delivery and surface risks early.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in technical program / project management for software or autonomy engineering teams
- Demonstrated mastery of requirement management — intake, refinement, traceability, and change control on complex programs
- Substantial hands-on experience with autonomy systems — e.g., unmanned/robotic vehicle platforms, perception, path planning, guidance/navigation/control (GNC), or multi-agent/swarm coordination — sufficient to engage directly with autonomy engineers and translate algorithm and systems-engineering concepts into structured requirements
- High Jira fluency, with the ability to configure dashboards, workflows and custom reports
- Excellent verbal and written communication; able to synthesize and decompose strategic vision into clear executable plans
- Experience standing up and driving adoption of new process framework / operating models from scratch
- U.S. Citizen with the ability to obtain a security clearance for work
Desired Qualifications
- Background in autonomy, robotics, aerospace, or defense programs — commercial UxS, military autonomy, or research environments
- Familiarity with simulation, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL), or field test environments used to validate autonomous systems
- Agile or Project Management certifications such as SAFe, Scrum Alliance, PMP, Lean Six Sigma
- Experience in product management, change management, or process improvement
- Experience operating in a highly technical, AI- and autonomy-forward team environment
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