Senior Technical Program Manager

The role
You'll work across our mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, software developers, and industrial designers, holding every project together as it moves from idea to install. The closest analogue is the project manager inside a company like Tesla who sits across a vehicle program: fluent enough in mechanical, electrical, firmware, and industrial design to talk every engineer's language, and good enough at holding a complex build together that nothing slips between the disciplines. You will be the eye in the sky on every active project — seeing where it really stands, asking the right questions, and making sure no one gets lost in the trees.

The work itself is genuinely novel. Each piece is a one-of-a-kind machine — custom PCBs, motion-control systems with stepper motors, injection-molded parts, custom software and firmware, overseas manufacturing — that has to converge into something that runs flawlessly for a decade. You'll own the development process for each piece end to end: ideation, prototyping, tooling, production, test, install. You don't do the engineering, but you've been close enough to it to stand toe-to-toe with engineers in a review, challenge an approach when the cost or risk doesn't add up, and recognise when a decision needs the Head of Engineering or the Artist pulled back in.

Day to day, you'll work most closely with the Head of Engineering (who lives in the design weeds with the team) and the Artist (whose vision the team is realising). When a brainstorm or design review produces a decision, you're the one who carries it forward — making sure the engineers apply it, that the build stays on track, that the Artist gets pulled back in for the constant design reviews that keep the aesthetics, motion, feel, and sound on point, and that the Head of Engineering is back in the room the moment a chosen approach stops making sense.

This role is also the QA conscience of the studio. These sculptures use thousands of motors, bearings, and custom parts; a single missed defect can cost millions to remediate after install. You'll define what "properly tested" means for each piece, design the test process and the custom jigs that make it real, and build a schedule with enough slack that when something goes wrong — and it will — there's time to correct it.

What you'll own

• Day-to-day delivery with the engineering team — working across mech/EE/SW/ID every day, keeping every project on track, surfacing risk before it lands, and making sure nothing slips between disciplines
• Schedules, budgets, and priorities across a portfolio of concurrent commissions — owning each piece's critical path from first prototype through tooling, production, test, ship, and install
• The triangle: you spend most of your day with the Head of Engineering, pull the Artist in for the constant design reviews that keep aesthetics, motion, feel, and sound on point, and loop either of them back the moment a decision needs them
• Manufacturability — turning genuinely novel designs into something we can build, test, and repeat reliably
• Test strategy — defining what "properly tested" means for each piece, spec'ing custom jigs and tools, and absorbing the failures we know are coming into the schedule
• Pre-pitch development — when the studio is scoping a new multi-million-dollar commission, you push the team to lay out viable approaches, ballpark costs and timelines, and prepare the decks they need to quote against
• The client relationship through install — calm, credible updates that translate studio reality into something the client can plan against

What you bring

• 8–12 years running complex physical builds — hardware projects involving motors, electronics, custom software/firmware, and overseas manufacturing
• Cross-discipline fluency: you can talk PCB design and ordering timelines with an EE, motor selection and tolerancing with an ME, firmware decisions with a developer, and material and finish decisions with an industrial designer
• Factory and vendor experience — you know what overseas lead times, injection-mold schedules, and PCB runs actually mean for a build
• Test strategy chops for novel hardware, including spec'ing the custom test tools that make a one-of-a-kind machine verifiable
• Mastery of Asana (or a close equivalent) — you're the person who makes the system reflect reality and gets the team to actually use it
• An eye for aesthetics — you understand we are not a tech company; the tech serves the art
• Strong client-facing communication
• On-site daily, with ~15% travel for installs and factory visits

Nice to have

• A hands-on background in electrical, mechanical, or manufacturing engineering — even if you've since moved into managing it
• A love of art, design, or architecture
• Familiarity with the full production lifecycle — bid packages, vendor selection, factory acceptance testing, commissioning, turnover
• You've prototyped or built your own tools (AI-assisted or otherwise) to make project management faster or sharper

The basics

• On-site at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, every day
• $180,000–$210,000 base, with an annual performance-based bonus tied to studio results
• ~15% travel, domestic and international, for site visits, factory trips, and installations
• Reports to: day-to-day partnership with the Head of Engineering and the Artist; the Managing Director owns comp and performance reviews
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Open vacation policy
• Summer Fridays