Senior Technical Program Manager

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Technical Program Manager based in South Africa.** As a Senior Technical Program Manager, you will help drive complex initiatives across a fast-moving product and engineering organisation building AI-powered technology. You will own program structure, workback plans, dependency management, operating cadences, and delivery visibility across a defined portfolio of technical programs. Your work will help engineering and product teams stay aligned while moving quickly in an AI-native environment. You will partner closely with engineering leads and product managers to deliver platform releases, integrations, migrations, and cross-functional initiatives. The role combines strong program management discipline with enough technical fluency to navigate architecture, APIs, integrations, and engineering trade-offs. You will also play an important role in shaping scalable TPM practices, templates, and operating norms. This is a remote EMEA position with regular collaboration and overlap with a London-based hub. ### Accountabilities - Establish and maintain an effective operating cadence across your area, introducing the minimum structure needed to keep teams aligned and decisions moving without unnecessary bureaucracy. - Ensure key decisions are made on time, involve the right stakeholders, and are documented clearly so there is a reliable record of what was decided and why. - Support recurring engineering rhythms such as planning, standups, retrospectives, and demos. - Own workback plans and dependency maps for a portfolio of releases, integrations, migrations, and cross-team engineering initiatives. - Maintain accurate project tracking and visibility across tools such as Linear, ensuring issues are properly labelled, estimated, assigned, and kept up to date. - Provide trusted views of production issues, in-flight work, blocked items, and overall program health so stakeholders can access status without relying on additional meetings. - Identify technical, delivery, and timeline risks early; challenge unrealistic assumptions and enforce readiness gates before external commitments are made. - Lead complex programs end-to-end, coordinating multiple teams through scope definition, sequencing, delivery, trade-offs, and stakeholder communication. - Manage cross-team dependencies and handoffs, resolving blockers directly with the relevant leads and preventing avoidable escalation to senior leadership. - Apply a clear escalation framework to distinguish between programs that are on track, at risk, or require leadership decisions. - Coordinate the first response to incidents and client-related interruptions within your area, ensuring issues are routed appropriately without unnecessarily disrupting engineering teams. - Translate technical realities, risks, and constraints into clear updates for non-technical stakeholders, while ensuring engineering teams understand business and delivery expectations. - Maintain a concise and reliable portfolio view for leadership and the wider TPM function, adapting the level of detail to the situation. - Produce clear weekly written status updates that give stakeholders and leadership visibility into program progress, risks, dependencies, and decisions. - Support product and engineering leaders with OKR tracking and reporting, keeping objectives and key results current and turning progress into clear, readable rollups. - Contribute to the development of TPM practices, documentation, templates, cadences, and trackers that can be adopted across the wider organisation. - Measure success through reliable operating rhythms, trusted program plans, timely delivery, early risk identification, reduced unnecessary escalations, and sustainable program-management practices. ## Requirements - 6+ years of experience in Technical Program Management, ideally within AI/ML, platform infrastructure, developer tooling, or similarly technical environments. - Demonstrated experience managing complex programs involving multiple teams, dependencies, and challenging external deadlines. - Strong technical fluency, with the ability to understand system architecture and discuss APIs, integration design, technical dependencies, and platform trade-offs confidently without needing to be the engineer making the technical decisions. - An engineering background is highly valued, particularly for candidates who have transitioned from engineering into technical program management. - Strong analytical and organisational skills, with the ability to turn ambiguous requirements, incomplete specifications, and competing stakeholder perspectives into clear plans and recommended paths forward. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to provide concise executive updates, detailed dependency information for technical leads, and appropriately scaled communication depending on the audience. - Strong judgment around prioritisation, escalation, risk management, and stakeholder alignment. - A proactive, hands-on approach to resolving blockers and coordinating teams rather than relying on hierarchical escalation. - Comfort working in a developing TPM function and contributing to the creation of processes, templates, standards, and operating norms. - Experience working in a high-growth scale-up environment is a plus. - Experience in an organisation that both builds infrastructure and uses that infrastructure for real customer workloads is also advantageous. - Ability to work effectively in a remote environment across EMEA time zones, with regular collaboration and overlap with colleagues in London. ## Benefits - 25 days of paid time off plus public holidays, supported by a Flexible Time Off approach. - Health insurance and private medical coverage. - Monthly stipend supporting wellness, fitness, and learning and development. - Fully remote working from anywhere in your home country within EMEA. - Enhanced parental leave for birth, adoption, or surrogacy. - Access to an office in The Shard in London. - Flexible working hours.