Director, Program Management

Slip Robotics is at the forefront of robotic automation, delivering cutting-edge solutions that transform how businesses move goods. Our autonomous platforms redefine efficiency, reliability, and scalability in logistics. We’re a fast-growing team of innovators passionate about helping customers adopt automation seamlessly and successfully.

Slip is growing on every axis at once: more products in development, more robots in the field, and a larger engineering team. Each new program has to move through development gates, into production, and out to customer sites, and then prove itself through field monitoring after launch. We're hiring a Director of Program Management to own that lifecycle end to end and to build the team that runs it.

You own the program management function: the NPD portfolio, the stage-gate process, the integrated schedule, program risk, and deliverable management. You run gates with real authority. Programs pass when the work is done, not when the calendar says so. You publish one portfolio view the exec team can trust. And you hire and lead a small team of program managers and TPMs, each owning a specific program area, so the function scales with the portfolio.

Responsibilities:

• You build a small program management team from nearly scratch: dedicated PM/TPMs for each program area as it matures. You define the roles, run the hiring, set the standards for how program management works here, and develop the people. We expect 1-2 hires in addition to our existing small team in the first year, sequenced by portfolio need.
• Programs from development to the field. A program isn't done at design freeze. You carry each one through development gates, through production ramp with the manufacturing team, through first deployments with field operations, and into post-launch field monitoring, until the product is stable and the lessons are fed back into the process. -
• The NPD program portfolio. Multiple new products in active development. You own gate sequencing, gate packages, program schedules, and risk for each one.
• The stage-gate process. Own the SOP, publish the gate calendar, and run every gate.
• The integrated schedule. One schedule per program that people actually use, with cross-functional dependencies visible and slips surfaced early instead of discovered late.
• Requirements traceability. The specification of record for each program with change control.
• Portfolio status. A single current view of every program for the exec team, produced without pulling engineers into status theater.

Requirements

• 8+ years of program management on physical products (hardware, or hardware plus software), including 3+ years hiring, leading, and developing program managers or TPMs.
• You have built or substantially grown a program management team, not just inherited one, and you can describe the roles you defined and why.
• You have run a stage-gate NPD process end to end, from concept gates through production release, on a product that shipped.
• You have carried a program past launch: production ramp, early field issues, and the feedback loop from the field back into engineering. - Schedule craft. You have built integrated master schedules that engineering teams actually maintained, not shelf-ware.
• Technical fluency to follow a design review on an electromechanical or software product and know when a risk is real.
• Preferred: Robotics, automotive, or aerospace background.
• You have stood up a PMO from scratch in a company that had never had one.
• Government or defense program experience.
• Requirements and program management tooling experience.