Senior Technical Program Manager

About OpenMined

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.

About the Role

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Responsibilities

• Own delivery end to end for OpenMined's flagship initiatives (ScreamingFace and AI Oversight), from quarterly goals to milestones, dependencies, and release dates.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Turn quarterly OKRs into dated, sequenced plans with product and engineering leads, and keep them current as research results and priorities shift.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Track and report progress on milestones, cycle time, and OKR key results to leadership, and flag slipping dates early with clear trade-off options.
• 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.