Senior Engineering Program Manager, Lead - Service Special Projects

Cupertino Until 10/4/2026 15+ years exp First posted August 5, 2026 Last posted August 5, 2026
Job description

We are looking for a highly seasoned Senior Engineering Program Manager to help get one of our most ambitious multi-year engineering programs off the ground. This is a hands-on, lead-level role for a seasoned program manager who has experience delivering large-scale and technically deep multi-team efforts from their inception. If you thrive when the problem is broad, the org is scaling up around them, and the technical stakes are high, this may be the role for you!

Description

In this role, you will be the connective tissue across engineering, research, design, and business functions from day one, turning ambitious goals into a coordinated, measurable plans that will drive our team forward.

You will own the end-to-end program management of a large-scale, cross-functional engineering initiative spanning client software, backend services, large-scale data systems, applied machine learning, evaluation, tooling, and platform engineering. You will be accountable for the plan of record — roadmap, milestones, dependencies, risks, and the executive-level narrative — and for the operating cadence that keeps every team aligned on what is expected, by when, and why.

You will need to be technical enough to hold your own in an architectural review and in a candid scoping conversation with a Principal Engineer. You will not write production code, but you will read designs, ask sharp questions, and translate deeply technical discussions into crisp, faithful summaries for leadership. When the program drifts, you will identify it early, name it clearly, and drive the correction with calm authority.

This is a lead role. Alongside your own work-streams, you will shape the program management practice — mentoring other EPMs, standardizing how progress is tracked, and raising the bar for how we plan and communicate.

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelors Degree plus at least 15 years of experience developing program plans and managing complex, cross-functional engineering programs in a technical product environment, with at least 3+ years in a lead or principal-level capacity.
Experience leading AI-first programs end to end — programs where the core product value is delivered by machine-learning or large-language-model systems, and where planning, scoping, and quality bars are inseparable from model behavior and evaluation.
Demonstrated experience running programs that span multiple engineering disciplines — client, services, data, applied ML, platform, and tooling — end to end.
Strong technical depth: able to read engineering design documents, follow architectural discussions across several disciplines, and independently reason about trade-offs, dependencies, and risk.
Working literacy with the modern AI stack — model training and evaluation lifecycles, offline vs. online metrics, data pipelines feeding models, latency/cost trade-offs, and the difference between a research result and a production-ready capability.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including a track record of writing crisp executive updates and delivering technical narratives to senior leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

MS or other advanced degree.
Project Management Certifications.
Experience with evaluation-driven engineering programs — where the definition of "done" depends on measured quality against explicit metrics.
Fluency with modern engineering tooling — issue trackers, planning systems, dashboards — with a bias toward instrumenting programs so status is derived, not narrated.

About this role

Summary

Manage and lead large-scale, cross-disciplinary engineering programs, especially AI-focused, from inception to delivery.

Job title

Senior Engineering Program Manager, Lead - Service Special Projects

Experience level

15+ years in complex engineering programs, 3+ years in lead role

Minimum experience

15+ years exp

Industry

software

Location requirements

On-site in Cupertino, no remote work allowed.

Salary

Not specified

Management role

Yes

Skills & keywords

Required skills

program managementarchitecture reviewtechnical communicationcross-disciplinary coordinationAI stack

Preferred skills

project management certificationsevaluation-driven engineeringengineering tooling

Specializations

program managementAIlarge-scale engineeringcross-functional coordinationmachine learning
Locations

Structured locations inferred from the posting.

Cupertino, CA, USA

On-site City