Principal Technical Program Manager (Product Operations)

Job Description

Job Description

About Us

Are you ready to build the future of supply chain? At Gather AI, we're not just creating software, we're pioneering a new era of warehouse intelligence. We've developed a groundbreaking, vision-powered platform that uses autonomous drones and existing equipment to capture real-time data, completely digitizing workflows that have historically been manual and error-prone. This means facilities operate smarter, safer, and more efficiently, ultimately redefining "on-time, in full" delivery.

If you're looking for an opportunity to contribute to truly transformative technology and make a significant impact in a vital industry, Gather AI is the place for you. We're leading the charge in the rapidly evolving robotics industry, and we invite you to join us in reshaping the global supply chain, one intelligent warehouse at a time.

About the Team

Our engineering organization spans autonomy, computer vision and machine learning, embedded and hardware systems, full-stack, and cloud, all working in parallel across multiple active product lines tied to live customer deployments. It's a technically deep, fast-moving team where individual contributors carry real accountability and the work shows up directly in customer operations. We're at the stage where the complexity of running concurrent programs across disciplines has outpaced informal coordination, and we're ready to fix that.

About the Role

Most program management roles ask you to run a process someone else already built. This one asks you to build it. 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

What You'll Need

• 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. Ideal candidates may have started in engineering and transitioned into program management, so deep program management experience across the entire career is not required
• A track record standing up prioritization frameworks that force explicit trade-offs, not just a stack-ranked backlog, 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, including status readouts, escalation paths, and post-mortems
• Ability to engage deeply with engineering teams, validate estimates, and drive alignment between technical execution and business objectives, with exposure to robotics, drones, computer vision, or edge and embedded hardware
• Strong command of tools like Jira or Linear, translating requirements into clear milestones and roadmap plans, with working familiarity with a major cloud platform like AWS or Azure
• We are open to a hybrid, flexible work arrangement for candidates who are able to work from our Pittsburgh office. For candidates who are remote, we are ideally seeking someone based in the Eastern Time Zone to align with team collaboration and business needs

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