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Principal Technical Program Manager

Seattle, WA or McLean, VA or Remote

About Us

Co-founded in 2023 by Joe Laws and Grant Verstandig, Trase Systems is AI, Uncomplicated. Trase empowers enterprise leaders to harness the full potential of AI without the associated complexity and risks. We are an end-to-end solution for deploying, managing, and optimizing AI in the enterprise. Our platform specializes in bridging the “last mile” of AI adoption, unlocking AI's full potential while driving efficiency and significant cost savings. Trase is at the forefront of AI Agent innovation, topping the Hugging Face GAIA Leaderboard for Generalized AI Assistants, ahead of industry giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. We are leveraging our cutting-edge technologies to develop mission-critical agentic applications in complex industries such as Healthcare, Oil & Gas, and National Security. 

About the Role

As a Principal Technical Program Manager, you will operate at both the architecture and execution layers. You'll drive our core AI platform development and customer deployments, but unlike traditional TPMs, you need to understand the code, the models, and the infrastructure—not just manage around them. You will drive the execution of our core AI platform and mission-critical agentic applications, ensuring that we ship world-class software on time and at quality. You will operate in a fast-paced environment where ambiguity is the norm, bringing necessary structure and rigor to our development lifecycle without slowing down our innovation.

You will partner closely with Operations and Engineering leadership to manage cross-functional dependencies and ensure that our technical roadmap aligns with our business objectives. The ideal candidate is a deeply technical expert who speaks the language of product managers and engineers, a relentless problem solver, and an operational leader who can influence without authority, and can blend strategic thinking with tactical execution.

Scope of Responsibilities

  • Drive Strategic Cross-Functional Planning: Work closely with product managers, engineering leads, and customer facing teams to develop integrated program plans, including roadmap, dependency identifications and resource plans. Drive the end-to-end lifecycle of complex technical programs from concept to launch, ensuring alignment across Engineering, Product, Design, and Customer Delivery teams.
  • Operating Rhythm: Establish and lead regular program level meetings with product and engineering leadership to ensure projects are driven to successful outcomes.
  • Operational Rigor: Establish and maintain lightweight, high-impact processes (Agile, Scrum, Kanban) that increase developer velocity and visibility without adding bureaucracy.
  • Risk & Dependency Management: Proactively identify technical risks, bottlenecks, and cross-team dependencies, particularly for deployments in regulated industries; implementing mitigation strategies before issues impact the timeline.
  • Release Management: Partner with DevOps and Engineering to streamline the release process, ensuring reliable and secure delivery of our AI platform and agentic applications to enterprise customers.
  • Stakeholder Communication: Serve as the primary source of truth for program status; translating complex technical details into clear updates for executive leadership and non-technical stakeholders. Synthesize findings into clear, concise, customer-focused problem statements, recommendations, business cases, analysis, plans of action, and risk assessments
  • Continuous Improvement: Use data and metrics to analyze engineering performance and drive continuous improvement in our development culture and operations.

Experience and Credentials 

  • Educational Background: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or related degree, or equivalent work experience.
  • Experience: 8+ years of experience in technical program management, engineering leadership, or software development, preferably in high-growth technology companies. Demonstrates 2+ years as a successful agilest and change agent, preferably in a B2B Saas environment. 
  • Technical Fluency: Deep technical fluency with experience managing programs related to AI/ML platforms, cloud infrastructure, or complex enterprise software.
  • Program Management & Execution: Expert-level experience in agile practices and project management. Experience includes backlog hygiene, workflow design, roadmap/milestone tracking. Highly execution-focused, milestone-based, and accountability-driven framing to ensure timely and effective program delivery. Proven track record of delivering complex, cross-functional projects on time and within budget in a startup or fast-paced environment.
  • Tooling Expertise: Direct experience utilizing modern PM tools (e.g., Linear preferably) for tracking, reporting, and process documentation.
  • Metrics & Reporting: Building and owning dashboards, tracking delivery completion percentage, managing capacity and forecasting models, and generating executive-level status reports as a core responsibility.
  • Capacity Planning & Forecasting: Creating a clear view of team capacity, workload, and delivery forecasts to inform strategic decision-making.
  • Communication: Exceptional ability to influence diverse stakeholders, translate between technical teams and business leaders, and align engineering capacity with business objectives. Weekly status updates, executive readouts, and go/no-go decision frameworks.
  • Problem Solving: Excellent problem-solving skills, with a demonstrated ability to troubleshoot complex build and deployment issues.
  • Adaptability: Self-starter with a growth mindset, adaptability, and a strong bias for action in a fast-paced, sometimes ambiguous environment.

Benefits

  • 100% employer-paid, comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family. 
  • Paid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay. 
  • Unlimited PTO, with management approval. 
  • Opportunities for professional development and continued learning with educational reimbursements. 
  • Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available. 
  • Mental health benefits through TARA Mind.

Some travel is required.

If you want to be on the cutting edge of technology, building AI solutions for the future, and are up for a challenge, let’s talk!

Salary Range: $190,000-250,000. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.

We’re an Equal Opportunity Employer: You’ll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.

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