Senior Technical Program Manager

Watertown, MA

R&D - Software /

Full-time /

On-site

The Company

We believe general-purpose, generally-intelligent robots will be built in our lifetimes. Robots will work in our factories, move our goods, walk on our streets and eventually be in our homes. To build that future, research and deployment must work in lockstep: real-world operation must make the technology better and better technology must make deployment easier. We're looking for the thinkers, builders, and researchers who want to be part of that loop.

As an AI robotics company that deploys its inventions directly into the facilities that need them, on state-of-the-art hardware, every line of code written at Tutor has a direct impact on the global, physical economy.

Our Culture

We believe that something truly special can happen when talented, motivated people work together; at Tutor, every member of our team is empowered to have real impact in everything that they do. We’re characterized by both technical excellence and next-level collaboration and respect.

The Role

Tutor is hiring a Senior Technical Program Manager to own program management for the Cassie workstream. Cassie is our robot worker for pallets and cases: we have many Cassie robots are in production at customer sites today and the next products built on the same platform are in development now. The workstream is about 15-20 engineers across software and hardware. This role will report to an engineering manager.

We’re looking for a candidate who has run programs long enough to know which parts of the job are not the interesting part - and has ideas for how to automate it. Chasing status, reconciling three trackers that disagree, tracking dependencies - all need to get done, but ideally not by a person. We’re looking for someone who has watched AI tools get good enough to do some of that grunt work and has a vision for how a program should run with automation, updating as tools increase in efficacy. We want the person who will build that automation while operating the program.

Tutor builds robot workers and deploys them directly into the factories and warehouses that need them. The Cassie workstream's output is measured in robots that keep running on a customer's line and in new products that reach production on schedule. That means one team carries a fleet in production and a platform in development at the same time, with software, hardware, manufacturing, deployment, and customer teams all collaborating. This role will own the integrated plan, the operating cadence, the risks, the cross-team dependencies, and the honest weekly picture of where things stand.

What you will do

• Own the integrated plan for the Cassie workstream: milestones, dependencies, and risks across software, hardware, manufacturing, and field deployment, covering both the fleet in production and the products in development. You would work closely with the engineering leaders of the workstream (as well as with all of the individual contributors on the team).
• Keep one source of truth. Linear, Notion, Slack, and employees’ brains should agree. When they do not, you find out first and fix the process, not just the record.
• Surface risk early and plainly: slipping dates, unowned work, hidden dependencies, and scope that grew without a decision.
• Write the status that leadership, engineering, and customer-facing teams read, in the register each needs. Be the person who gets asked "what is actually going on with X" and has the answer.
• Build and own the automation: agents and scripts that pull status from tickets, pull requests, and chat, draft updates, flag drift, and chase follow-ups, so people spend their time on judgment rather than collection.
• Build tools which coordinate hardware change orders, manufacturing builds, and software releases so that what reaches a customer site is a matched set.

Requirements

• 8+ years of technical program or project management on teams that ship physical products or complex software, including several years at a senior level.
• Exacting attention to detail. You catch the inconsistency in the tracker, the date that quietly moved, and the acceptance criterion nobody wrote down.
• Daily fluency with current AI tools in your own work, and a concrete vision for how program management should be rebuilt around them. Be ready to show us something you built or automated, not just describe it.
• Enough technical depth to follow engineering discussions on software architecture, hardware design, and manufacturing, and to push back when an estimate or a plan does not hold together.
• Clear, concise writing and verbal communication.

Nice to haves (zero or more)

• Program management experience at more than one company, including at least one large company and at least one startup.
• Worked as a software or hardware engineer before moving into program management.
• Ran programs that span hardware and software with a manufacturing dependency: engineering builds, engineering change orders, field retrofits.
• Robotics, industrial automation, or industrial equipment background.
• Wrote the automation yourself: scripts, agents, or integrations against the Linear, Jira, GitHub, or Slack APIs.
• Comfortable on a factory or warehouse floor, and willing to travel occasionally to customer sites and manufacturing partners.

$180,000 - $220,000 a year

Tutor offers competitive benefits including fully employer-covered health insurance, a managed 401(k), and regular in-office meals. We also offer unlimited PTO and holidays. We host social events and maintain a collaborative, low-ego work culture where people are trusted to take ownership and solve real problems. Tutor is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds.