Scheduled Hours
40

Position Summary
The Translational AI Group in the Washington University Department of Radiology is the steward of XNAT, the leading open-source imaging informatics platform used by more than 200 research and clinical institutions worldwide. We are seeking a Senior Technical Project Manager to own the day-to-day and strategic operations of the XNAT open-source project. This is a high-impact, highly visible role at the intersection of software engineering, scientific research, and community leadership.
The Sr. TPM will serve as the operational backbone of XNAT - coordinating a distributed team of internal engineers and external open-source contributors, managing release engineering, driving documentation quality, and communicating progress to funders, institutional partners, and the broader imaging informatics community.

Job Description

Primary Duties & Responsibilities:

Program and Project Management

• Own the XNAT project roadmap in coordination with engineering leadership and key stakeholders, translating strategic goals into actionable sprints and milestones.
• Plan, schedule, and track delivery across internal development teams and distributed open-source contributors using Agile and Kanban methodologies.
• Identify risks, dependencies, and blockers proactively; drive resolution across engineering, product, and partner organizations.
• Facilitate sprint planning, retrospectives, and cross-team stand-ups; maintain project health dashboards and status reports.
• Manage multiple concurrent workstreams across XNAT core platform, plugins, integrations, and community initiatives.

Open Source Community Stewardship

• Act as the primary operational point of contact for the XNAT open-source developer and user community.
• Coordinate contributions from external developers and institutional partners, managing pull request workflows, code review cycles, and contribution guidelines.
• Triage community-reported issues, feature requests, and bug reports; prioritize and route to appropriate team members.
• Organize and facilitate community calls, developer meetings, and user forums; represent XNAT at relevant conferences and workshops.
• Maintain contributor documentation including onboarding guides, coding standards, and governance policies.

Release Engineering and Delivery

• Own the XNAT release process end-to-end: versioning strategy, release branching, changelog management, packaging, and distribution.
• Coordinate release readiness across engineering, QA, and documentation teams; manage feature freeze and stabilization periods.
• Maintain CI/CD pipeline health in coordination with DevOps; ensure release artifacts are reproducible and well-documented.
• Plan and communicate release schedules to internal stakeholders, institutional partners, and the open-source community.

Technical Roadmap Support

• Collaborate with the project director, engineering leads, and key institutional partners to define and refine the XNAT technical roadmap.
• Translate high-level strategic objectives - including NIH-funded initiatives and ARPA-H deliverables - into concrete engineering milestones.
• Track industry trends in medical imaging informatics, DICOM standards, and AI/ML tooling to inform roadmap prioritization.
• Facilitate architecture and design reviews; capture and distribute technical decisions and architecture design records.

Documentation

• Own the XNAT documentation strategy across technical (developer-facing) and end-user (researcher and clinician-facing) content.
• Plan, assign, and review documentation deliverables aligned with each release; ensure docs ship with code.
• Write and edit technical content including installation guides, API references, plugin development guides, and upgrade notes.
• Produce end-user documentation including tutorials, workflow guides, and video script outlines for the XNAT community.
• Maintain and improve the XNAT documentation site; enforce content standards and information architecture.

Stakeholder Reporting and Communications

• Prepare progress reports, milestone summaries, and deliverable documentation for NIH, ARPA-H, and other federal and institutional funders.
• Draft and distribute community-facing communications: release announcements, newsletters, roadmap updates, and meeting minutes.
• Maintain metrics and KPIs for project health, community engagement, and release cadence; visualize and present data to leadership.

Support grant reporting activities in coordination with the PI team and sponsored programs offices.

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work performed by people assigned to this classification. They are not intended to be construed as an exhaustive list of all job duties performed by the personnel so classified. Management reserves the right to revise or amend duties at any time.

Required Qualifications

Education:
Bachelor's degree or combination of education and/or experience may substitute for minimum education.

Certifications/Professional Licenses:
No specific certification/professional license is required for this position.

Work Experience:
Leadership (7 Years)

Skills:
Not Applicable

Driver's License:
A driver's license is not required for this position.

More About This Job

Required Qualifications:

• Seven years of experience in technical project management, program management, or a senior engineering leadership role.
• Demonstrated experience managing open-source software projects or large multi-stakeholder software initiatives.
• Strong understanding of modern software development practices: Agile/Scrum, CI/CD, Git workflows, and release engineering.
• Exceptional written communication skills; proven ability to produce high-quality technical and end-user documentation.
• Experience writing reports and deliverable documentation for government or institutional funders (NIH, NSF, DoD, or equivalent).
• Ability to coordinate across geographically distributed teams with varying technical backgrounds.
• Comfortable operating at both strategic (roadmap, stakeholder alignment) and tactical (sprint planning, issue triage) levels.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Background in biomedical informatics, medical imaging, radiology, or a closely related scientific domain.
• Familiarity with XNAT, DICOM, or related medical imaging standards and frameworks.
• Experience supporting or managing open-source communities on platforms such as GitHub, JIRA, or Confluence.
• Prior experience in an academic medical center, research hospital, or life sciences software company.
• Experience supporting NIH R01, ARPA-H, or similar federally funded research programs.
• Technical degree (B.S./M.S. in computer science, biomedical engineering, informatics, or equivalent) or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

Education:
Master's degree - Biomedical Engineering

Certifications/Professional Licenses:
No additional certification/professional licenses unless stated elsewhere in the job posting.

Work Experience:
No additional work experience unless stated elsewhere in the job posting.

Skills:
Atlassian Confluence, Atlassian JIRA, Biomedical Informatics, CI/CD, Communication, Cross-Team Coordination, DICOM Images, End User Documentation, GitHub, Git Workflow, Life Sciences Industry, Medical Centers, Medical Imaging, NIH Grants, Open Source Software (OOS), Quality Documentation, Radiology, Release Engineering, Report Writing, Scrum (Agile), Software Development Process, XNAT

Grade
G16

Salary Range
$96,000.00 - $169,300.00 / Annually

The salary range reflects base salaries paid for positions in a given job grade across the University. Individual rates within the range will be determined by factors including one's qualifications and performance, equity with others in the department, market rates for positions within the same grade and department budget.

Questions

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Accommodation

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