Technical Program Manager (Software Engineer)

We're seeking a Technical Program Manager (TPM) who understands how distributed systems are built and why they fail, and pairs that depth with exceptional organizational and communication skills. The ideal candidate is a self-starter who thrives in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and can drive execution through ambiguity with confidence and clarity. As a TPM at Runpod, you'll lead complex, cross-functional programs across product and platform teams, working closely with engineering leads and stakeholders across the company. You'll help build the core of our cloud platform: the systems that schedule, scale, route, and run customer workloads on GPU infrastructure across regions. You'll anticipate risks early, keep teams focused on what matters, and deliver high-impact work that creates real value for our customers. The ideal candidate is a dynamic problem solver - not a pure process follower. Responsibilities: - Partner with engineering leads to understand squad architecture, constraints, and technical debt, and build plans that reflect how the systems actually behave. - Own planning and delivery for complex, multi-team programs: scope, sequencing, dependencies, and timelines, with close attention to cross-service and cross-region dependencies. - Identify technical risk early (scaling limits, failure modes, capacity constraints, migration complexity) and drive mitigation before it reaches customers or commitments. - Participate in design and architecture reviews, surfacing gaps in rollout plans, observability, and fault tolerance. - Drive launch readiness and safe rollout of platform changes, including staged releases, rollback plans, load and failure testing, and operational handoff. - Serve as the primary point of contact for stakeholders, with clear, regular status updates and risks escalated early alongside options and recommendations. - Work with Data, Product, and Engineering leads to define and track success metrics for performance, reliability, utilization, and cost, tied to customer outcomes. - Partner with SRE to build visibility into system health, and help leadership balance investment in reliability, scale, and new capabilities. - Coordinate with Supply and Data Center teams on how capacity and infrastructure changes affect platform roadmaps. - Run post-launch and post-incident reviews, and drive the resulting improvements to completion. Requirements: - 3+ years in technical program management or software/infrastructure engineering, leading complex programs for cloud or infrastructure products. - Hands-on engineering experience on production distributed systems, with deep understanding of consistency and availability tradeoffs, queueing, scheduling, autoscaling, load balancing, failure handling, and performance at scale. - Hands-on familiarity with cloud infrastructure fundamentals: compute, networking, storage, containers and orchestration, and multi-region architectures. - Ability to read architecture docs, review designs, and hold credible technical conversations with senior engineers, including on reliability, latency, and capacity tradeoffs. - Experience with observability and operational practices (metrics, logging, tracing, SLOs, incident response) and using them to drive program decisions. - Proven track record of delivering multiple high-impact programs across 3+ cross-functional teams, from planning through launch. - Strong quantitative skills, with the ability to turn system and cost data into clear recommendations. - Deep understanding of the software development lifecycle and how engineering teams design, build, test, and ship production systems. - Exceptional written and verbal communication, with the ability to align stakeholders across teams and functions. - Ownership mindset: highly organized, proactive, and calm under pressure, favoring clarity and follow-through over rigid process. Preferred: - Previous experience in AI/ML developer platforms or GPU/cloud infrastructure-focused organizations. - Experience in a fast-paced startup environment. - Technical degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field. What You'll Receive: - The competitive base pay for this position ranges from ($140,000 - $165,000). This salary range may be inclusive of several career levels at Runpod and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, including the candidate's experience, qualifications, and location - Meaningful equity in a fast-growing company- everyone on the team receives stock options - your impact drives our growth, and you share in the upside. - Generous medical, dental & vision plans - Flexible PTO- take the time you need to recharge - Most roles are remote work first with an inclusive, collaborative teams utilizing slack as the main form of internal communication - Join a passionate team on the cutting edge of AI infrastructure - where culture, learning, and ownership are at the heart of how we scale. - $1,200 Home Office & Equipment Stipend-We set you up for success from day one with gear and support to create your ideal workspace