Principal Technical Program Manager

Job Description

KIOXIA America is seeking a Principal Technical Program Manager (TPM) to join the SSD Business Unit Program Management Office (PMO). This senior individual-contributor role will provide program leadership for the organization’s most complex, high-impact, and strategically important SSD initiatives from product definition through development, qualification, high-volume manufacturing, customer readiness, sustaining, and end of life.

The Principal TPM will be based within KIOXIA America and serve as a senior program integration leader between the U.S. subsidiary and KIOXIA’s global headquarters in Japan, bringing together Engineering, Firmware, Validation, Quality & Reliability, Product Line Management, Technical Product Management, Customer Technical Support, Business Development, Operations, and other stakeholders. The role is accountable for driving execution across organizational boundaries, including integrated schedules, critical paths, cross-program dependencies, strategic risks, decisions, actions, and executive escalation.

The successful candidate will combine deep SSD technical knowledge with exceptional program and organizational leadership. They will operate with a high degree of autonomy in ambiguous environments, anticipate systemic issues and dependencies, understand how decisions across hardware, firmware, NAND, controller/ASIC, validation, qualification, manufacturing, and customer enablement affect the broader product portfolio, and influence senior and executive leaders to drive predictable business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end execution of the most complex and strategically important SSD programs, potentially spanning multiple products, customers, development teams, and product generations.
• Serve as a senior cross-functional program leader, establishing alignment on objectives, priorities, execution strategy, success criteria, lifecycle gates, and exit criteria.
• Build and govern integrated program schedules covering key milestones, critical paths, cross-program dependencies, qualification, customer readiness, and manufacturing deliverables.
• Anticipate systemic risks and dependencies across programs; drive mitigation and recovery strategies before they materially affect customers or business commitments.
• Lead resolution of highly complex technical and business tradeoffs involving scope, architecture, resources, quality, schedule, customer requirements, and business priorities.
• Establish effective Core Team operating mechanisms focused on program health, critical decisions, actions, risks, dependencies, and escalations rather than functional status reporting.
• Drive accountability across functional and organizational boundaries for agreed deliverables, milestones, decisions, actions, and boundary agreements.
• Provide clear, fact-based program assessments, recommendations, and decision frameworks to senior and executive leadership.
• Coordinate effectively between KIOXIA America and KIOXIA’s global headquarters in Japan, influencing senior stakeholders across organizations, geographies, disciplines, and time zones.
• Drive product development and qualification readiness across SSD builds, firmware maturity, validation, issue resolution, manufacturing, and customer qualification dependencies.
• Resolve ambiguous blockers and drive high-impact decisions to closure with clear owners, dates, rationale, and measurable outcomes.
• Partner with PMO, engineering, and product leadership to define and evolve program governance, lifecycle/gate processes, integrated planning, dashboards, decision mechanisms, and portfolio execution practices.
• Identify systemic execution gaps across the SSD portfolio and lead cross-organizational improvements that increase delivery predictability, execution efficiency, and transparency.
• Mentor technical program managers and cross-functional leaders, establishing best practices and raising program-management capability across the organization.
• Champion data-driven program management and automation to improve program visibility, identify emerging schedule or risk changes, and reduce manual status reporting.
• Capture and institutionalize lessons learned, ensuring improvements extend beyond an individual program and strengthen future product execution.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in complex hardware/software product development, semiconductor, storage, memory, or an equivalent technical product environment.
• Extensive technical program or project leadership experience delivering large, highly complex, business-critical product development and New Product Introduction programs.
• Demonstrated experience leading programs spanning multiple organizations, technical disciplines, product dependencies, and senior stakeholders.
• Expert ability to build and govern integrated schedules, critical paths, cross-program dependencies, risk portfolios, milestones, and recovery strategies.
• Deep understanding of SSD architecture and development, including controller/ASIC, NAND, DRAM, firmware, hardware, validation, qualification, reliability, manufacturing, and customer enablement.
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior and executive stakeholders and lead highly matrixed organizations without direct reporting authority.
• Proven ability to frame and drive difficult decisions, resolve significant ambiguity, and balance technical, customer, business, resource, quality, and schedule tradeoffs.
• Strong systems thinking and analytical problem-solving skills, with the ability to identify patterns and systemic risks across programs rather than addressing issues only at the individual-project level.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including executive-level program assessment, recommendations, decision framing, and escalation.
• Experience working with geographically distributed teams; experience coordinating between a U.S. organization and global headquarters in Japan is highly valued.
• Experience with modern program tracking, analytics, and dashboard tools such as Jira and Power BI or equivalent platforms.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience leading enterprise or data-center SSD product development and qualification programs of significant scale and complexity.
• Experience with SSD New Product Introduction, development build planning, qualification, transition to high-volume manufacturing, and customer deployment.
• Deep familiarity with semiconductor product lifecycles and vertically integrated development environments.
• Experience defining and scaling PMO operating mechanisms, governance, lifecycle gates, portfolio planning, and executive reporting across an organization.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor senior program managers and influence execution practices across multiple teams or programs.
• Track record of identifying systemic organizational or execution challenges and leading durable cross-functional improvements.
• Ability to use data-driven automation and reporting to surface exceptions, schedule movement, cross-program dependencies, and emerging risks.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline required.
• Master’s degree in Engineering, or a related discipline preferred.

Additional Information

Req#2290; #LI-JV1;

The expected salary for this position is $155,420.00 - $259,030.00

At KIOXIA, we value the following:

• Investment in you
  • Offering opportunities for career growth and personal development training
• Open-minded management
  • Empowering employees by listening and responding to ideas, issues, and approaches
• Flexible work-life balance
  • Offering a generous PTO allotment, holiday shutdown, and flexible work options
• Diversity of cultures, perspectives, backgrounds and experiences of all our team members
  • Through our diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, our focus is to strengthen our company culture to create more inclusion and belonging for all
• Benefits for our team members
  • Excellent medical and non-medical benefits, 401(k) matching, pet insurance

KIOXIA America, Inc. provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.