Technical Program Manager, Release – Mission Autonomy

ABOUT THE JOB

We are seeking a highly motivated Technical Program Manager (TPM) to oversee the software release lifecycle within Air Dominance & Strike (AD&S). In this role, you’ll serve as the operational backbone for our release cycles, partnering with engineering leadership to ensure on-time, high-quality software releases to support our customers. You’ll bring both strategic systems thinking and execution excellence: blending your ability to proactively identify dependencies and technical risks with an unwavering bias for action and a deep commitment to product quality. This is a high-impact role for someone who thrives in ambiguity and loves building processes that scale.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• End-to-End Release Ownership: drive the software release process from planning to testing and deployment, ensuring on-time, stable releases that meet customer requirements.
• Architect & Elevate Release Quality: define and continuously evolve quality gates, test strategies, and critical release metrics. Partner closely with engineering teams to ensure rigorous testing and embed quality at every stage of the development and release pipeline.
• Bridge Teams and Drive Execution: act as the connective tissue between engineering, test & evaluation, and program management, ensuring seamless execution across teams.
• Strategic Prioritization & Decisive Execution: establish clear frameworks for prioritization, communication, and decision-making that help teams cut through ambiguity and focus on what matters. Rapidly assess technical risks and identify critical release blockers, developing actionable plans to drive issues to resolution.
• Continuous Process Improvement: architect and champion a release management process that balances speed with stability, seeking feedback and leveraging data to implement improvements that scale.
• Transparency & Data-Driven Management: utilize and champion industry-standard program management tools (e.g., JIRA, Confluence) to track progress, manage issues, visualize key metrics, and facilitate transparent, real-time communication across stakeholders.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• 4+ years of proven experience managing technical programs in high-paced, mission-critical software development environments.
• Deep technical acumen: understand software development lifecycles, system architectures, testing methodologies, and quality assurance principles, enabling effective navigation of technical challenges and trade-offs.
• Relentless prioritization: proven ability to identify, escalate, and drive critical path issues to resolution, ensuring release integrity and timeliness.
• Exceptional communication: ability to effectively engage in technical discussions and translate technical details to diverse internal audiences.
• Data-driven & analytical mindset: comfort leveraging metrics and analytics to drive decisions, measure release health, and continuously improve quality.
• Highly organized: Able to manage concurrent priorities in a fast-moving environment.

DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Direct experience with release management, CI/CD pipelines, and advanced software build systems in a complex, multi-component environment.
• Background in defense, hardware, autonomy, or robotics deployments, with an understanding of associated mission-critical quality standards.
• Demonstrated ability to thrive and provide strategic direction in ambiguous, rapidly evolving environments with minimal oversight.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.