Staff Technical Product Manager
Vannevar Labs · Remote · 7mo ago
Vannevar builds AI systems for the Department of War's most consequential missions. We have 125 deployments across every branch and combatant command spanning our core platform and five distinct products. An an example of how we work, when major combat operations started with Iran, we fielded a new product supporting 24/7 operations and 9,000+ users in three months.
How we build is our advantage: we deploy forward with the people who own the mission. Our engineers, product team, and CTO deploy forward to the point of friction, including visiting units in Ukraine. We focus on embedding directly with operational units supporting great power competition with China, combat operations with Iran, and counter-narcotics missions.
About the role
We’re hiring a Staff Technical Product Manager to lead definition and evolution of foundational platform capabilities spanning multiple engineering organizations. This role reports directly to the CTO and operates at the system level - shaping the structures and primitives that underpin our products rather than managing feature-level roadmaps.
You will own problems that cross organizational boundaries and cannot be solved within a single team. The objective of this role is improving structural coherence across the platform - defining durable system structures and primitives, aligning stakeholders, and ensuring they translate into real capability.
Operating in close partnership with engineering leadership, this role progressively assumes independent ownership of convergence and cross-organizational decision resolution. Execution coordination is part of the role, but performance is measured by durable system improvement and structural convergence.
Example problem spaces include:
- Authorization and policy models
- Identity and ownership boundaries
- Data access structures
- Platform abstractions and shared primitives
What you’ll do
- Define and evolve cross-platform system primitives and structures, translating mission and product needs into durable system behaviors and producing artifacts that clarify system intent (PRDs, specs, evaluation criteria)
- Drive resolution of structural problems spanning multiple engineering organizations
- Build alignment across engineering leadership, design, and mission stakeholders
- Maintain convergence momentum across teams implementing shared capabilities
- Partner with Engineering Managers to translate structural intent into execution plans and hold convergence through delivery
- Stay engaged through delivery to ensure implementations converge on intended outcomes
- Identify architectural divergence early and drive corrective action
- Identify and drive resolution of cross-team dependencies arising from shared platform primitives and structural initiatives
What we’re looking for
- Experience operating at Staff level in TPM, product architecture, or engineer-to-PM hybrid roles
- Strong systems reasoning across distributed systems, identity/authorization, or platform architecture
- Demonstrated success shaping technical direction across multiple teams
- Demonstrated ability to drive cross-organizational technical initiatives through to outcome - articulating tradeoffs, aligning stakeholders, and landing durable decisions
- Credible communicator able to influence senior engineers and technical leadership across domains without relying on formal authority structures
- High ownership mindset in ambiguous environments
- Outstanding driver and communicator who identifies structural risks early - such as unclear ownership, missing definitions, or weak execution setup - and intervenes to correct course
Nice to have
- Background in platform, infrastructure, or security domains
- Experience with policy or authorization systems
- Multi-tenant or regulated environment exposure
- Experience operating in environments with decentralized ownership or competing platform abstractions
What we offer
Comprehensive Benefits
- Health, dental, and vision insurance
- Remote friendly with WeWork access
- Unlimited PTO, shared downtime during the federal holiday calendar, and company-wide off time at the end of each year
- 401(k) match
- Lifestyle & wellbeing stipends
- Salary top-up during military reserve duty
- Fully paid parental leave
- Child and pet care reimbursement during travel
We are committed to protecting the privacy of all applicants. Official emails from the company will come from an @vannevarlabs.com domain. Under no circumstances will a legitimate representative from our company contact you to request passwords, financial information, or other sensitive personal data. Please be vigilant of potential scams.
