Technical Program Manager (Robotics & Autonomy)
Tera AI
IT, Operations
San Diego, CA, USA
Posted on Mar 19, 2026
We are looking for a deeply committed Technical Program Manager who has successfully shipped cutting-edge AI models in aerospace & robotics, managed relationships with customers, has exceptional software engineering management knowledge, and thrives in fast-paced, unstructured environments.
What you’ll do
- Contribute hands-on to AI model and product development, including pretraining, fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment
- Translate product goals into actionable roadmaps
- Plan and execute product development initiatives, owning timelines and delivery
- Influence org structure and hiring
- Mentor team members
Qualifications
- Master’s degree or PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics or related field, or equivalent experience.
- 4+ years of experience in technical program management or applied AI/ML roles, ideally in high-growth startups or fast-paced research orgs.
- Expertise with one or more of computer vision, vision-language models, or foundation model development.
- Experience working with academic / PhD-level researchers
- Strong track record of turning ambiguous technical goals into successfully shipped models, features, tools, or systems.
- Preferred: 1+ years robotics experience
Our team
Our team is composed of AI pioneers and leaders from Google DeepMind, Shield AI, Caltech & MIT. Several of us are repeat founders, with deep commercialization insights across multiple enterprise segments. We enjoy long, deep ideations around entirely unexplored AI use cases in autonomy.
Who you are
- Learn-it-all, not know-it-all: you have an innate curiosity for all things intellectual, and it’s something you can’t turn off. You obsess over finer details others miss.
- High intensity: you thrive in a high-stakes environment, and are driven by an innate obsession, not by others.
- Fast learner: you gravitate toward learning new things, and often find yourself learning more quickly than everyone around you.
- Driven by discomfort: you enjoy leaving your comfort zone and challenging yourself
- Creative: track record of solving hard problems with solutions worthy of academic papers
- Educator: you take pride in your ability to communicate complex topics clearly and have excellent speaking and writing skills.
- Zero ego: you don’t just take feedback, but see it as a gift. You don’t wait until feedback is given, but solicit it with every opportunity.
- Founder mentality: you roll up your sleeves to help solve the most pressing problem on a given day, even if it has nothing to do with this job post.
Location
Bay Area, Los Angeles, or San Diego