Senior Technical Program Manager at OpenMined

Canada

$127k - $159k

About OpenMined<p>OpenMined is a 501(c)(3) non-profit foundation that brings together leading minds in AI, security, and privacy technology to develop open-source solutions that transform how data can be accessed and shared. Founded in 2017, we've grown into a global community of over 18,000 members working to ensure that privacy protection and AI innovation reinforce each other rather than undermine one another. We are driven by a simple challenge: the most valuable data for solving humanity's greatest challenges remains locked away due to privacy concerns, and we can change that through technology rather than compromise.</p>About the Role<p>We're looking for a Senior Technical Program Manager to own how OpenMined plans, tracks, and ships its most ambitious work. You'll work most closely with Ronnie Falcon, Chief Product Officer, and you'll be the person accountable for timelines, dependencies, and delivery across our product, engineering, research, and partnerships teams.</p><p>OpenMined runs several high-stakes efforts at once. ScreamingFace is an open-source toolkit for composing multiple LLMs into systems that beat any single frontier model, with a public leaderboard and a research fellowship. AI Oversight builds privacy-preserving infrastructure that lets AI labs, auditors, and safety institutes run evaluations without exposing models or data, with pilots alongside frontier labs. These efforts span multiple teams, tools, and funders, and they move fast under real research uncertainty.</p><p>Our product leads decide what to build, and our tech leads decide how it's built. You'll own when and in what order it gets delivered. That means turning goals into milestones with real dates, keeping roadmaps current rather than rewriting them once a year, and making our tools a source of truth people trust. It also means telling leadership early when a date is about to slip and what the options are.</p><p>This is a technical role. You'll work daily with engineers and researchers on distributed systems, LLM infrastructure, and privacy-enhancing technologies. You don't need to write production code, but you need to understand the work well enough to break it down, spot risk, and challenge an estimate.</p><p>We're an AI-native team. Our engineers ship with AI coding agents, our main codebase releases several times a week, and our tools and habits keep evolving as AI does. We're looking for a seasoned technical program manager who has built and run project management practices for teams like this. You'll bring years of hands-on experience, use AI to make planning, tracking, and reporting faster and lighter, and help OpenMined become a team that is excellent at project management, not one that depends on a single person to do it.</p><p>This is an independent contractor engagement, roughly a full-time commitment, with an initial 12-month term we expect to renew. You set your own schedule, but we need your working hours to overlap substantially with US Eastern business hours (your local time within about one hour of ET).</p>Responsibilities<ul><li>Own delivery end to end for OpenMined's flagship initiatives (ScreamingFace and AI Oversight), from quarterly goals to milestones, dependencies, and release dates.</li><li>Design, run, and keep improving our project management practice for an AI-native team: planning, tracking, status reporting, and retros built around how engineers work with AI agents today, and updated as those tools change.</li><li>Build AI into how we manage projects: use and build AI agents and automations that draft status updates, summarize Linear, GitHub, and meeting activity, flag risks and stale work, and keep plans current with little manual upkeep.</li><li>Make the whole team better at project management: set standards and templates, coach product and engineering leads, and grow project management skills across the team, laying the groundwork for future project management hires.</li><li>Turn quarterly OKRs into dated, sequenced plans with product and engineering leads, and keep them current as research results and priorities shift.</li><li>Run a living product roadmap that is reviewed on a regular cadence and can feed grant proposals and funder reports without a last-minute rewrite.</li><li>Be the single accountable owner for cross-team dependencies when one initiative spans several boards, teams, or external partners, and chase down blockers yourself before they cause a slip.</li><li>Own our project management tooling (Linear for engineering, Asana for cross-functional work): set conventions, cut noise, and make sure status in the tools matches reality.</li><li>Connect code to plans: make sure work in GitHub links to Linear issues across all active repos, and keep PR review, release status, and repo ownership visible.</li><li>Track and report progress on milestones, cycle time, and OKR key results to leadership, and flag slipping dates early with clear trade-off options.</li><li>Coordinate external deliverables such as partner pilots, program launches (e.g., our research fellowship), and grant milestones, so commitments to partners and funders are met.</li></ul> Must-Haves<ul><li>7+ years of technical project or program management, delivering complex software with product and engineering teams. Transferable experience, such as a software engineering background, will also be considered.</li><li>Built or rebuilt a project management practice: set up planning cadences, tooling, and standards that a team kept using, earned buy-in through credibility rather than heavy process, and raised others' project management skills.</li><li>Has shaped project management for AI-native teams: worked with engineers who build with AI coding agents, and changed processes as those workflows evolved.</li><li>Uses AI in their own project management work every day: has built or set up AI agents, automations, or workflows for status reporting, risk detection, planning, or tracker hygiene, and can show concrete results.</li><li>Delivered under continuous shipping and technical uncertainty: R&amp;D, ML/AI, infrastructure, or developer platforms with frequent releases and changing plans.</li><li>Technical foundation: a computer science or other technical degree, or 3+ years working as a software engineer. Comfortable reading code, PRs, and architecture docs.</li><li>Deep, hands-on use of engineering trackers such as Linear, Jira, and GitHub. You've designed a team's workflow, not only used one.</li><li>Clear, concise communication, written and spoken: you can explain status, risk, and trade-offs to engineers, executives, and funders.</li></ul>Preferred<ul><li>Experience working on a fully remote, distributed team.</li><li>Has mentored or managed other project or program managers, or helped hire them.</li><li>Experience with LLMs, AI evaluation, AI safety, or privacy-enhancing technologies.</li><li>Experience at an early-stage startup or research lab where you built the delivery process from scratch.</li><li>Experience managing grant-funded or partner-funded deliverables, such as reporting milestones to funders.</li><li>Experience coordinating with external partners on pilots or integrations (e.g., AI labs, research institutions, government).</li><li>Open-source project experience, as a contributor or as a project or release manager.</li></ul>Compensation<ul><li>Contract fee: $127,000 - $159,000 USD annualized, invoiced monthly.</li><li>Actual offers will be determined based on the candidate's skills, level of experience, and location.</li></ul> <ul><li>Mission-Driven Work: Be part of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, focused on social impact rather than profit, offering the chance to make a meaningful difference in the world.</li><li>Open Source Contribution: Make a real impact by contributing to an Open Source project that benefits a broad community.</li><li>Collaborative Global Team: Join a dynamic, international team that values collaboration and diversity.</li><li>Flexible Work Hours: Enjoy the autonomy to structure your work hours around what best fits your life and productivity.</li><li>Fully Remote Work: Work remotely within the location requirements for this role.</li></ul>