Lead Technical Program Manager

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, which manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Lead Technical Program Manager based in Canada.**

We are seeking an experienced Lead Technical Program Manager to coordinate complex, cross-functional engineering programs within an innovative SaaS environment focused on AI-powered marketing technology. In this senior individual-contributor role, you will oversee critical platform releases, integrations, technical migrations, and engineering commitments for major enterprise clients. You will bring structure to fast-moving teams by establishing clear delivery plans, managing dependencies, and ensuring risks are identified before they affect outcomes. Working closely with engineering, product, and client-facing teams, you will translate business needs into realistic technical commitments and reliable execution plans. You will also help evolve program management practices, introduce AI-enabled workflows, and mentor other program managers. This remote opportunity is ideal for a technically fluent, highly autonomous leader who thrives in ambiguity and enjoys improving how engineering organizations deliver at scale.

Accountabilities

• Own a portfolio of complex, cross-team engineering programs, including platform releases, enterprise integrations, technical migrations, and high-impact client commitments.
• Manage engineering requests from Tier 1 enterprise clients, overseeing intake, scoping, prioritization input, sequencing, and delivery tracking.
• Translate client requirements into clear, actionable engineering work in collaboration with product managers, engineering leads, and client-facing teams.
• Establish readiness gates before external commitments are made, maintain realistic timelines, and provide a single reliable view of open client requests, ownership, status, and delivery dates.
• Anticipate conflicts between client demands and product roadmap priorities, surface trade-offs early, and recommend practical solutions.
• Design and maintain operating cadences that help engineering and product teams stay aligned, make timely decisions, and document outcomes without unnecessary meetings.
• Support sprint planning, standups, retrospectives, and demos, coordinating broader cross-team reviews when required.
• Create and maintain detailed workback plans, dependency maps, project trackers, and delivery schedules, ensuring ownership and progress remain visible.
• Keep project management tools, such as Linear, accurate and actionable, with issues properly assigned, estimated, labelled, and updated.
• Maintain trusted reporting views for production bugs, blocked work, in-flight programs, and client commitments so stakeholders can access status without additional meetings.
• Identify technical, operational, and schedule risks early, challenge unrealistic plans, resolve cross-team blockers, and escalate decisions to leadership when appropriate.
• Coordinate incident and client-interruption response through a designated first-responder process, ensuring urgent issues are routed and addressed without unnecessarily disrupting engineering teams.
• Produce clear weekly written updates for stakeholders and leadership, adapting the level of detail to the complexity of each program.
• Support product and engineering leaders with OKR tracking, progress reporting, and visibility into risks or deviations from objectives.
• Develop reusable templates, operating procedures, delivery frameworks, and automation that improve efficiency across the wider technical program management function.
• Mentor junior program managers, coordinate shared program activities, contribute to hiring interviews, and bring effective practices from leading AI-native engineering organizations into the team.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of experience as a Technical Program Manager, ideally within AI/ML, platform infrastructure, developer tooling, or related technical environments.
• A proven track record of independently delivering complex, cross-functional programs involving multiple teams, external deadlines, technical dependencies, and significant business impact.
• Experience managing engineering delivery commitments for enterprise or Tier 1 clients, including requirement clarification, realistic scheduling, risk communication, and stakeholder alignment.
• Strong technical fluency, including the ability to understand system architectures, APIs, integration design, platform dependencies, and technical trade-offs without directly owning engineering implementation.
• An engineering background is highly desirable, particularly experience transitioning from software engineering or another technical discipline into program management.
• Excellent planning and organizational skills, with the ability to turn ambiguous requirements, incomplete specifications, and competing stakeholder perspectives into clear plans and recommended actions.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to adapt updates for senior leadership, technical leads, and client-facing teams.
• Experience creating and maintaining dependency maps, workback schedules, delivery dashboards, escalation frameworks, and structured reporting processes.
• Demonstrated ability to identify risks proactively, challenge optimistic delivery estimates, resolve blockers directly, and reduce unnecessary escalations to senior leadership.
• Experience mentoring other program managers and developing reusable templates, workflows, and operating practices that improve team-wide performance.
• A track record of introducing tools, automation, or new ways of working that measurably reduce operational overhead and improve delivery efficiency.
• Strong judgment, autonomy, and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to balance delivery discipline against the need for speed and flexibility.
• Familiarity with AI-native engineering workflows and an interest in using AI tools to improve planning, coordination, reporting, and execution.
• Experience in a high-growth scale-up or an organization building infrastructure while simultaneously operating it under real customer workloads is an advantage.
• Ability to work remotely from within Canada and maintain regular working-hours overlap with teams based in London.

Benefits

• Flexible remote work: Work from anywhere within your home country in Canada, the United States, or Latin America, subject to the role's location requirements.
• Paid time off: 25 days of PTO plus public holidays, with a flexible time-off approach.
• Health coverage: Health insurance or private medical coverage.
• Wellness and development: A monthly stipend to support fitness, wellness, and learning and development.
• Enhanced parental leave: Additional parental leave provisions for parents through birth, adoption, or surrogacy.
• Flexible working hours: Flexibility to organize your schedule while maintaining collaboration with international teams.
• Office access: Access to the company's London office at The Shard when visiting.
• Career development: Opportunities to influence engineering delivery practices, mentor other program managers, and help shape a growing technical program management function.
• Specific salary figures, retirement contributions, and additional compensation details were not disclosed in the provided job description.