Senior Engineering Program Manager, Lead - Service Special Projects

Socket.dev; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Socket.dev in Cupertino, CA seeks a highly seasoned Senior Engineering Program Manager to lead a large-scale, multi‑team engineering program from inception to delivery. You will own end-to-end planning, cross‑functional alignment across engineering, research, design, and business units, and you will mentor other EPMs while raising the bar for execution.

You will read designs, participate in architectural reviews, manage roadmap, milestones, risk, and executive communications, with hands-on

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree required; 15+ years in program management for cross-functional engineering programs.
• Experience leading AI-first programs end to end with strong scoping, quality, and delivery metrics.
• Proven ability to coordinate client software, backend services, data systems, and platform engineering.
• Ability to read designs, engage in architectural discussions, and translate technical detail into executive updates.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end management of large-scale, cross-functional engineering programs.
• Own roadmap, milestones, dependencies, risks, and executive narrative.
• Mentor other EPMs and standardize progress tracking and communication practices.
• Collaborate across engineering, research, design, and business functions from day one.
• Participate in architectural reviews and driving corrective actions when projects drift.

Skills

Cross-functional leadership

Program management

AI/ML programs

Technical leadership

Communication

Planning

Architectural reviews

Education

Bachelor's degree

MS degree

Tools

Issue trackers

Planning systems

Dashboards

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.