Principal Technical Program Management

About this role

Join Axon and be a Force for Good.

At Axon, we’re on a mission to Protect Life. We’re explorers, pursuing society’s most critical safety and justice issues with our ecosystem of devices and cloud software. Like our products, we work better together. We connect with candor and care, seeking out diverse perspectives from our customers, communities and each other.

Life at Axon is fast-paced, challenging and meaningful. Here, you’ll take ownership and drive real change. Constantly grow as you work hard for a mission that matters at a company where you matter.

Join Axon and be a Force for Good

At Axon, we're on a mission to Protect Life. We're explorers, pursuing society's most critical safety and justice issues with our ecosystem of devices and cloud software. Like our products, we work better together. We connect with candor and care, seeking out diverse perspectives from our customers, communities and each other.

Life at Axon is fast-paced, challenging and meaningful. Here, you'll take ownership and drive real change. Constantly grow as you work hard for a mission that matters at a company where you matter.

Your Impact

As a Principal Technical Program Manager on the Real-Time Operations team, you will own highly complex and ambiguous technical programs that span multiple teams and pillars. You will own the outcome the program exists to deliver and serve as a trusted partner to product, engineering and senior leadership.

You will partner with engineering and product management to drive programs from inception through design, development, deployment and post-production. You will translate early ideas and proposals into executable plans with clear requirements, milestones, dependencies and success metrics.

At this level, the problems we hand you may not have a clear requirements document, a defined owner or an obvious path forward. You will identify problems and opportunities before requirements exist, bring structure to ambiguity, build alignment across teams and drive commitments that move the work forward.

You will own end-to-end technical requirements, help engineering teams evaluate architectural trade-offs and ensure decisions are made with scalability, reliability, availability and long-term maintainability in mind.

The Real-Time Operations team builds, deploys and maintains products for emergency responders, specifically built around the Axon Fusus platform. Because every second counts for our customers, any production outage, functional regression or performance degradation that lasts even a few minutes can have a real impact.

The ideal candidate builds trusted relationships across a wide range of personalities, holds people to their commitments, and has the technical credibility to be respected by engineers and the executive presence to be heard by senior leaders.

Location: Seattle

Reports to: Sr. Director of Technical Program Management

Direct reports: None

What You'll Do

• Own highly complex technical programs across teams and pillars, from strategy and early definition through launch and post-production.

• Translate ambiguous business and technical problems into clear requirements, plans, milestones, dependencies and measurable outcomes.

• Own program plans, schedules, resourcing and change management while holding teams accountable for committed deliverables.

• Foresee, manage and mitigate risks across teams and pillars.

• Track cross-team dependencies, identify opportunities to parallelize work, delegate risk ownership and create clear escalation paths.

• Define program success metrics, measure progress against them and communicate results to leadership.

• Own end-to-end technical requirements and bring engineering teams together on system design and architecture.

• Help teams evaluate decisions involving data stores, caching, technical stacks, system boundaries and where business logic should live.

• Lead technical discussions focused on scalability, reliability, availability and long-term maintainability.

• Drive technical trade-off discussions with leaders using sound technical judgment and sufficient technical depth.

• Partner with business, legal, information security and policy stakeholders early so programs are positioned for long-term success.

• Own status and strategy communication for your programs and present at MBRs and senior review forums.

• Advise product and engineering directors and VPs on program risks, sequencing, dependencies and execution strategy.

• Build and improve the architecture, process and program documentation required to keep complex programs moving.

• Define and improve TPM artifacts, tools and mechanisms that can be reused across teams.

• Identify opportunities to use AI to accelerate execution, decision-making and program management practices.

• Mentor TPMs and educate teams across R&D on strong program management practices.

• Interview and calibrate candidates for senior TPM, engineering and leadership roles.

• Work effectively with teams across multiple time zones.

What Success Looks Like

• Within 90 days: You own your portfolio or initiative and have developed a clear written assessment of its current state, risks, dependencies and opportunities that leadership can act on.

• Within 6 months: Cross-pillar commitments are clear and holding. Leaders use your reporting to make decisions and adjust priorities when needed.

• Within 12 months: You have delivered measurable results across multiple teams or pillars, and the mechanisms you created are being reused by other programs or TPMs.

What You Bring

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Science or a related field. Master's or PhD optional.

• 10+ years of experience managing complex software or hardware/software delivery.

• 2 to 3 years of experience as a technical individual contributor, engineer or equivalent hands-on technical role, or comparable technical depth developed through your career.

• A record of leading large, cross-team…