Technical Program Manager - Augmented Reality Research
Description
Are you ready to improve the world through the power of Augmented Reality?
We’re looking for a Technical Program Manager who will work across R&D, engineering, product, and design to both build near-term tactical schedules and plan out the long-term deployment for our Machine Learning and Augmented Reality efforts.
You will coordinate the work of the Research and Development Team (London), to drive high-risk innovations and to help integrate R&D progress across the larger company. You will adjust priorities, set the rhythm for individuals and teams, and clearly communicate technical tradeoffs between the UK team and others, including those in US time zones.
This Program Manager will organize workstreams and adjust processes. You should enjoy learning from other engineers and researchers from varied specialties, to understand their issues, and to manage uncertainty, so you can best support and coach them. Being self-directed and having a strong work ethic will be critical in this role.
We are passionate about discovery, so this person will learn and grow, deploying inventions that make better “adventures on foot, with others,” for millions of users.
Responsibilities
- Nurture a diverse team of scientists and engineers, helping to build advanced software systems.
- Partnering with engineering, product, design, and legal teams, build and execute multiple projects simultaneously while ensuring key objectives are achieved.
- Ensure every sub-team and engineer understands what they need to deliver and when.
- Triage and prioritize the work requested of you and the teams you support, while considering the experimental and sometimes unpredictable nature of some of the projects.
- Create templates, workflows, and processes that are lightweight and exactly suited to the team’s needs.
- Coordinate and run meeting agendas.
- Quickly identify schedule risks and communicate possible solutions.
- Consistently document decisions and communicate those to impacted teams.
- Employ and teach tools used for issue tracking, documentation, and resource scheduling.
- Assess and measure long term and short term goals and objectives, evaluate project success, maintain up to date information and relevant technical documentation.
- Seek opportunities to improve ways of working, and to build new processes that will enhance performance and team unity.
- Cultivate and maintain cross-team collaborations, mentor and guide team members to overcome challenges, and enable people to produce work that will make a significant impact on Niantic’s mission.
Qualifications
- Proven experience in leading a successful agile team, preferably within a research environment.
- Ability to proactively lead and problem-solve in technical discussions with domain-experts.
- Ability to communicate pros/cons candidly with product managers, development partners, marketing, legal, and executive teams.
- Experience building roadmaps and project/release plans with a deep understanding of dependency and risk management.
- Experience managing software releases.
- Well versed in Agile and JIRA.
- Possess strong attention to detail, while keeping track of what is practical.
- Ability and curiosity to read technical reports and documents, to critically assess trends and breakthroughs.
- BS or MS degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
- 5+ years of experience in engineering, and software program management.
Plus if...
- Experience working in AR, VR, or computer vision-related fields.
- Exposure to building and using machine learning data and systems.
- Affinity for connecting technology with creative and enjoyable experiences.
- Keen to acquire new knowledge, to be relatively fluent with the research team’s work.
- Inherently attracted to the scientific method, and to share skills and knowledge with others.
