Technical Program Manager

The posting, as Robots and Pencils wrote it

Technical Program Manager

3 days a week on-site in NYC or Mountain View, CA; ~20% client travel required.

Company Overview

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm building the next frontier of business architecture. We design and ship AI co-workers that integrate into enterprise operations and deliver measurable results for our clients. We're all in on AWS, combining deep UX capability with senior engineering talent to get AI into production fast and keep it there.
We’ve earned the trust of leaders across Consumer Products and Retail, Education, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing and more, and earned a reputation as the nimble alternative to traditional global systems integrators. Founded in 2009, with delivery centers in Canada, the United States, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, we are smaller, faster, and more senior by design. Our teams average 15+ years of experience. We move fast, sweat the details, and build things that actually ship.

Position Overview

As a Technical Program Manager, you own the full arc of large, multi-workstream programs, from translating a client’s business goals into a technical plan through launch and the value it delivers afterward. You sit at the intersection of business and engineering: facilitating architecture and engineering discussions, shaping technical direction alongside our engineering leads, and keeping multiple distributed teams moving toward the same outcome.

Why This Role Matters

The biggest engagements Robots and Pencils takes on are enterprise AI, cloud, and agentic transformations with many teams, many stakeholders, and real money on the line. Technical Program Managers are what keep those programs from fragmenting. You can sit with a client executive in the morning and an engineering lead in the afternoon and make sure both are working toward the same business result. When priorities conflict, or risk shows up with limited information and a tight deadline, you frame the trade-off clearly and drive the decision, so our promise of production-ready AI holds at enterprise scale.

What You’ll Do

Program Leadership

• Own end-to-end delivery of large-scale ($10M+) AI, digital, and cloud transformation programs, from strategy and roadmap through launch and realized business value
• Take large, complex programs and break them down into manageable, deliverable workstreams with clear ownership, sequencing, and dependencies
• Drive program schedules from design to launch across multiple concurrent Agile teams, keeping delivery managers and product managers aligned on one integrated plan
• Define program-level KPIs and governance, using data to report program health and guide decisions across scope, timeline, budget, and quality

Technical Direction

• Bridge business requirements and technical solutions, distilling customer needs into clear technical requirements and mapping each one back to the business outcome it serves
• Facilitate engineering and archite

[…]
n. You treat clients' businesses like your own. You take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously.

• Resourceful when the budget, timeline, or team is tight. Constraints don't slow you down. They sharpen you.
• Calm when it gets hot. When scope, timeline, and stakeholders pull in three directions, you slow the room down enough to make the right call. You’d rather raise the hard trade-off in week two than absorb it in week eight.
• Glad to be in the room with people who care as much as you do. Our teams average fifteen-plus years of experience. We hire people who push each other to do better work.

The below range reflects the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range may be modified in the future. An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, seniority, geographic location, performance, shift, travel requirements, sales or revenue-based metrics, any collective bargaining agreements, and business or organizational needs. The salary range for this role is $180,000 USD - $215,000 USD. We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance and 401(k) to eligible employees.

An offer of employment may be conditional upon successful completion of a background check in accordance with local legislation and our candidate privacy notice. Your current employer will not be contacted without your permission. We are committed to ensuring equal employment opportunities for all job applicants and employees. Employment decisions are based upon job-related reasons regardless of an applicant's race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, marital status, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other status protected by law.