Staff Technical Program Manager - AI/ML

Staff Technical Program Manager - AI/ML

San Mateo, CA

Do you want to join an AI/Machine Learning Engineering team committed to delivering the PlayStation experience for millions of users? The work we do delivers impactful insights to build an increasingly dynamic and interactive experience! The AI/ML Engineering Group delivers optimized interactions across PlayStation experiences and systems by designing, coding, training, documenting, cost-effectively deploying and evaluating very large-scale machine learning systems.

We are looking for a Staff Program Management who helps us deliver delightful AI and ML products and experiences for millions, in an agile environment, collaborating with teams-across Engineering, Product and Design. Further, you will be immersed in AI/ML technologies, tools and processes, as you help to advance our technical objectives and architectural initiatives

This role sits inside an AI/ML Engineering organization delivering production machine learning systems at platform scale, personalization, recommendation, experimentation, or trust & safety models serving a large, global user base. The team designs, trains, deploys, and continuously evaluates prooducts in production, spanning applied science, AI, ML infrastructure, and engineering.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the delivery roadmap for one or more AI/ML systems in production, from model concept through training, deployment, and post-launch monitoring.
• Define success with our business partners before delivery begins
• Partner with applied scientists, Data Engineering, and ML Engineering to translate model performance targets (accuracy, latency, cost-per-inference) into a program plan with clear milestones and dependencies
• Drive alignment across engineering, applied science, product, and data analytics on scope, tradeoffs, and sequencing when priorities are ambiguous or contested
• Track model and system health post-launch, adoption, drift, cost, and incident rate — and drive remediation when metrics degrade, rather than treating launch as the finish line
• Manage cross-team and cross-timezone dependencies for distributed system and ML teams, surfacing schedule risk early
• Own vendor and third-party tooling relationships that intersect with ML delivery (labeling, compute, evaluation tooling), including production readiness and issue tracking
• Communicate program status, risk, and tradeoffs in terms non-technical stakeholders can act on, and in terms technical stakeholders will trust
• Identify and resolve conflicts between competing technical approaches or team priorities, escalating only what genuinely requires executive input.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years as a technical program manager, with at least 3 years specifically on AI/ML or applied data science delivery
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
• Working fluency in the ML lifecycle, can understand why a deployment might be blocked on data quality vs. infra vs. model performance, and ask the right question in each case
• Track record of running distributed, cross-timezone engineering programs end-to-end
• Demonstrated ability to drive decisions among senior technical stakeholders without formal authority.
• Experience managing day-to-day execution for agile/scrum teams, including sprint planning, backlog health, and velocity tracking
• Strong written and verbal communication across both highly technical and executive/non-technical audiences

Preferred Qualifications

• Gaming Experience is a Plus
• Direct experience in the specific AI/ML domain named for this role (e.g, trust & safety, personalization, recommendation, experimentation).
• Hands-on software development background
• Experience with ML infrastructure tooling (feature stores, experimentation platforms, model registries, MLOps pipelines)
• Prior work directly under or alongside engineering leadership
• Demonstrated curiosity to continuing to learn new AI/ML techniques and tooling

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