Principal/Staff Technical Program Manager (Robotics/AI)

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, US; hybrid

Salary: USD 165,000–230,000 per year

Company

hirify.global develops Tally, an autonomous shelf-scanning robot for enterprise grocery and retail, combining robotics hardware, ROS-based software, edge and cloud AI/computer vision, data platforms, and retailer-facing reporting systems.

What you will do

• Own cross-functional schedules for Tally generation launches, fleet-wide hardware/software migrations, and large retail rollouts with fixed external dates.
• Define integration checkpoints across hardware, ROS-based on-robot software, edge CV inference, cloud model updates, data pipelines, and retailer-facing reporting.
• Set completion criteria, ownership, and recovery actions when integration milestones slip.
• Drive end-to-end deployment readiness, including the handoff from engineering build to stable operation in retail stores.
• Maintain dependency maps, cross-functional review cadence, and technically defensible top-risk reporting for leadership.
• During the first 30 days, build dependency graphs for two priority programs, document risks to the nearest external date, and establish a review cadence with real functional inputs.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience personally building, integrating, or debugging a complex product spanning physical hardware and robotics software.
• Depth in at least one of hardware, robotics software including ROS or comparable middleware, or cloud/data platforms, with real fluency across the other domains.
• Ability to guide engineers who do not report to you and shape decisions and estimates through technical insight and collaborative problem-solving.
• Track record delivering programs where hardware or software slips had real-world consequences at customer sites, across field fleets, or against fixed external dates.
• Ability to build only the process and cadence needed to remove delivery friction without slowing engineering execution.
• This is not a project-coordinator role, a hardware-only role, or an engineering-leadership substitute; the role drives cross-functional execution without owning the technical roadmap or architecture decisions.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on autonomous retail robotics deployed at fleet scale in real stores.
• Collaborate across product engineering, robotics engineering, hardware, embedded software, AI/CV, cloud/data, and retail-facing systems.
• Culture emphasizes results, empathy, transparency, agility, innovation, leadership, and customer value.
• Work involves cutting-edge AI and robotics technologies applied to retail operations.