Senior Technical Project Manager, IT (R5279)

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company focused on protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. They are seeking a Senior Technical Project Manager responsible for driving the end-to-end delivery of complex technical programs across cross-functional organizations, ensuring alignment and effective execution of projects.

Responsibilities:

• Lead end-to-end delivery of complex technical programs and projects — spanning software development, platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, data and analytics, and system integrations — from initiation through to production release and stabilization
• Act as the connective tissue across cross-functional teams including Engineering, Product, Design, Data, DevOps, Security, and Business Operations — aligning priorities, resolving blockers, and maintaining delivery momentum
• Design, implement, and continuously improve project delivery processes and workflows tailored to the organization’s technical context — including intake and scoping, sprint ceremonies, release coordination, dependency tracking, and post-delivery retrospectives
• Develop and own project delivery artefacts: project charters, detailed plans and schedules, RACI matrices, risk registers, status dashboards, and decision logs; always keep them current and decision-relevant
• Establish and manage governance structures including steering committees, technical review checkpoints, change control processes, and escalation paths appropriate to the complexity and risk profile of each initiative
• Partner with Engineering and Product leadership to align technical roadmaps with business priorities; facilitate trade-off conversations around scope, capacity, technical debt, and delivery sequencing
• Proactively surface and manage risks, issues, and dependencies across workstreams; develop mitigation strategies and drive resolution with clarity, urgency, and accountability
• Own project financials — track budgets, actuals, and forecasts; report variances to leadership with context and corrective actions
• Facilitate requirements clarification, technical scoping, and estimation sessions in partnership with engineering leads, architects, and product managers; translate business needs into well-defined delivery scope
• Drive and coordinate cross-team release planning, sprint reviews, and PI planning ceremonies in agile and scaled agile environments; ensure dependencies between squads are visible and managed
• Define and embed delivery metrics and reporting frameworks — velocity, cycle time, delivery predictability, risk exposure — to give leadership clear, real-time visibility across the portfolio
• Lead change management and communication planning for technically complex initiatives; ensure impacted teams and stakeholders are informed, prepared, and aligned throughout delivery
• Develop and maintain process documentation, delivery playbooks, workflow standards, and tooling guidance; institutionalize best practices so delivery quality scales beyond individual programmes
• Prepare and present concise, well-structured executive status updates, programme reviews, and decision packages for senior technical and business leadership

Requirements:

• 5+ years of project or program management experience, with a consistent focus on technical or technology-led initiatives including software development, platform engineering, data or cloud program
• Demonstrable experience working across cross-functional technical teams — IT, Product, Design, Data, DevOps, Infrastructure, and Security — acting as an integrator who drives alignment and delivery across organizational boundaries
• Proven ability to design and implement delivery processes and workflows from scratch or in under-defined environments; able to assess what's needed, build pragmatically, and iterate based on what works
• Strong grasp of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and technical delivery patterns — including CI/CD pipelines, sprint-based delivery, release trains, and environment management — sufficient to manage delivery risk and engage credibly with engineering teams
• Hands-on experience with agile and hybrid delivery frameworks: Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, or equivalent; comfortable designing the right delivery model for the program rather than applying a single methodology dogmatically
• Strong command of core PM disciplines: scope management, scheduling, risk and issue management, dependency tracking, budget oversight, resource planning, and executive reporting
• Experience with modern project and engineering tooling: Jira, Confluence, Smartsheet, Linear, Notion, or equivalent; able to configure and adapt tooling to support team workflows and leadership visibility
• Excellent facilitation and communication skills — able to run complex multi-team workshops, lead technical planning sessions, and present clearly to both engineering audiences and executive stakeholders
• PMP, PRINCE2, PMI-ACP, or equivalent certification (or demonstrated applied experience at equivalent level); agile certifications welcomed
• High degree of autonomy and self-direction — comfortable operating in ambiguous environments with minimal structural support; able to build structure where it doesn't yet exist
• Experience delivering across multiple technical domains simultaneously — e.g., concurrent platform, data, and product workstreams — with the ability to manage inter-team dependencies at program level
• Background in cloud migration or cloud-native program delivery (AWS, Azure, GCP); understanding of infrastructure-as-code, containerization, and DevSecOps practices and how they affect delivery planning
• Exposure to data and analytics program delivery including data platform buildouts, data pipeline implementations, BI and reporting tooling, and data governance workstreams
• Experience with API-led integration program and the delivery complexity of connecting internal systems, third-party platforms, and data sources across distributed architectures
• Familiarity with technical architecture review processes; able to participate in architecture decision discussions and understand delivery implications of architectural choices
• Background in regulated technical environments (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR) with experience managing compliance requirements as a delivery constraint
• Experience deploying AI, machine learning, or data science capabilities in a production context; understanding of the unique delivery challenges in probabilistic and iterative ML development
• Prior background as a software engineer, technical business analyst, or solutions architect — bringing ground-level technical credibility that enhances delivery quality and stakeholder trust