About the role:
We are seeking a highly talented and experienced Technical Program Manager to join our exceptional team, leading the charge on the development planning and execution for major systems in our groundbreaking digital micro-device manufacturing platform. We have created the ultimate cross-functional agile development environment, our “Hybrid Fab,” that enables rapid iteration on both our manufacturing technology and the devices we produce.
The ideal applicant is deeply technical in at least one of mechanical, electrical, and/or software engineering, creative, principled, and self-starting. We use spiral and agile methodologies and approach development with tightly focused cross-functional teams, so experience with building in such an environment is highly desirable.
We have TPM roles open in both our Berkeley and Santa Clara, CA offices.
What you’ll do:
- Take full end-to-end ownership of a number of high-precision fully autonomous system projects, through iterative design (including DFM), build, test, and deployment through to commissioning.
- Map business objectives to the technology development effort and work with the team to decompose business objectives, risk analysis and platform goals into clear iterative deliverables that are measurable, realistic, and specific.
- Drive planning and development with the Atomic Machines Product Development Process (PDP, based on the Incremental Commitment Spiral Methodology, ICSM) taking ownership to prepare for and conduct design and iteration review meetings, conduct derisking analyses and decomposition of products into DoEs and intermediate/final deliverables, manage technical dependencies across subsystems and platform technical concerns.
- Conduct rigorous xFMEAs at design and production level.
- Own the development and deployment of manufacturing processes that we can export to contract manufacturers for fab build-outs, including: control plans, MTBF analysis, lean principles.
- Make contributions to the PDP itself based on learnings from its use to accelerate the company’s future development.
- Make strong use of agile development processes - sprint planning, reviews, retrospectives, stand-ups - to ensure frequent product feedback via deployment and use of products in the Hybrid Fab.
What you’ll need:
- 5+ years of experience as a Technical Program Manager in a multi-disciplinary environment, including experience leading complex integrated products with electronic/software control from conception to commercial release.
- Substantive experience as a hands-on engineer, designing and building complex systems – ideally highly automated precision systems. Your technical depth allows you to have productive highly technical discussions with the engineering team, e.g. driving alignment by assessing various approaches with their associated risks/benefits.
- Experience managing at least one project where either:
- The mechanical engineering aspects involved more than just static structures like chambers, casings, etc., but additionally involved dynamic mechanisms, kinematics, motion control, ideally high-precision motion control, sensing, closed feedback loops, complex hardware/software interactions.
- The software integration aspects involved deploying either an embedded system that drives real hardware in a control loop, or a platform system that deployed a new functionality commercially.
- Understanding of (and ideally significant direct experience using) agile methodologies.
- A first-principles approach to thinking through decisions like buy/build, specificity/generalization of capabilities, evaluating technology investments and so on.
- Experience releasing products to manufacturing following a defined process.
- Excellent communication skills - articulate, concise/crisp, high signal-to-noise ratio.
- At least a BS in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or Computer Science.
