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Palo Alto, California, United States
Onsite
Mind Robotics is building Physical AI for real-world industrial deployment, starting with the factory floor. We believe the hardest problems in AI are solved when researchers and engineers are hands-on with the physical world every day - and we're looking for people who are passionate about robotics, value ownership, and are excited to tackle difficult problems. Join us if you want to move beyond digital intelligence and put intelligence into motion.
Program Management at Mind is an operational catalyst. We own outcomes, drive the trade-offs that keep engineering moving, and set the metabolic rate of the teams we partner with — clearing roadblocks, closing stalled decisions, carrying risk upward, and protecting the focus engineers need to build. As a Software Program Manager you will own the integrated program plan across all of software and build the practice itself: how teams define their own milestones and commit to org-level ones, how we know week over week whether we are on or off track, and how problems surface early enough that we can still do something about them. You will partner directly with hardware program management so that software and hardware roll up into one program picture rather than two competing ones.
Responsibilities:
End-to-End Ownership: Own the software program plan end to end — from roadmap planning through implementation, integration, validation, and release to the fleet — and own the functional outcome, not just the schedule.
Program Practice Design: Establish how software program management works at Mind: the planning rhythm that connects team-level work to org-level milestones, what qualifies as a milestone, what "done" means at each one, and the artifacts that support both the individual engineer and leadership in prioritization and decision making.
Milestone Planning: Build software plans that align with org-level milestones, including clear definitions of what “done” means at each step.
Metric Tracking: Monitor and report on key program metrics, and communicate status, blockers, and risks to leadership.
Progress Tracking & Status Integrity: Build the tracking layer that answers whether we are on or off track, drawn from the systems teams already work in.
Risk Mitigation: Identify and escalate technical, dependency, and resourcing risks early, and and drive them to resolution.
Technical / Business Judgment: Engage directly in architecture and design discussions at a depth sufficient to stress-test engineering estimates and pressure-test readiness. Drive decisions at that level with understanding of the impacts to our business goals.
Educational Background: Bachelor's degree in engineering (software / computer science preferred), or equivalent experience.
Industry Experience: 5+ years of experience in technical program management for software products, ideally in robotics, autonomous systems, or another domain where software ships against hardware and real-world deployment constraints.
Proven Track Record: Demonstrated success taking software from early development through release and sustained operation.
Technical Depth: Strong software fundamentals with the ability to engage meaningfully in architecture, planning, and systems integration discussions.
System Complexity: Experience managing programs spanning multiple interdependent software domains along with their dependencies on hardware revisions and the availability of test hardware.
Execution & Ownership: High sense of urgency, comfortable with ambiguity, and driven by an "engineering curiosity" to understand how the entire system works.
