Technical Program Manager – New York.

01The firm

A senior firm, sized like a startup.

Convolving is a Swiss-based AI services firm running fixed-fee sprints for clients across five regulated industries. Delivery is partner-led on every engagement, and the team has shipped 30+ engagements to date. We pair tenured functional operators with AI-native engineers and a Technical Program Manager on every sprint, so the redesign lands in production rather than in a slide deck.

Engagements run 3 to 12 weeks at a flat fee. No retainer creep, no timesheet tracking, no change orders. When the artifact is shipped and adopted, the engagement closes. The hiring bar is senior across the firm: we do not build pyramids and we do not staff with juniors.

02The role

The person who makes the sprint land.

This is the seat that makes the artifact land. We hire Technical Program Managers out of operational engineering, applied-AI program management, or technical chief-of-staff backgrounds. The hire has run cross-functional delivery against a technical artifact, not just against a roadmap.

Your seat owns the sprint cadence, the weekly stakeholder review with the client sponsor, the adoption metrics, and the post-launch handover. You sit between the AI Process Engineer (who is building) and the Functional Expert (who is defending the controls), and you keep both honest. The Partner running the engagement owns the commercial relationship; you own the operating relationship.

First 90 days: shadow two active engagements, take TPM lead on a third, and own the post-launch handover for two engagements that ship in your first quarter. By month six you are running one engagement at a time and contributing to the firm’s internal sprint playbook.

03What you’ll do

The work, week to week.

• Run the sprint cadence (3 to 12 weeks) including daily stand-ups, weekly stakeholder reviews, mid-sprint health checks, and end-of-sprint retro.
• Own the adoption metrics: who is using the artifact, where it is being bypassed, where exception volume is rising, and report those numbers to the client weekly.
• Translate between the engineering work product and the client’s executive sponsor, including written status memos that survive forwarding.
• Manage the post-launch handover end-to-end: training materials, runbooks, on-call rotation handover to client engineering, and the 30-day check-in.
• Hold the line on scope. Convolving sells fixed-fee sprints; you are the seat that names scope creep early and brings it back to the Partner.
• Track every engagement against the firm’s internal sprint playbook and contribute the patterns back so the next TPM starts a week ahead of where you started.

04What we’re looking for

The shape of the hire.

• Five or more years of program-management or technical chief-of-staff experience, with at least two of those running delivery against a technical artifact (a shipped system, not a slide deck).
• Demonstrated record of running fixed-deadline sprints with senior stakeholders and a small, opinionated engineering team.
• Working fluency with at least one major AI assistant in your own week, and enough technical reading fluency to follow what the AI Process Engineer is shipping.
• Direct experience in adoption work: training materials, runbooks, change rollout. Not a project manager; an adoption manager.
• Plainspoken written communication. We publish a lot of internal writing.
• Comfort calling scope creep in front of a Partner and a client sponsor in the same room.
• US work authorisation required (we do not sponsor visas at this stage). Convolving has no US legal entity; we engage US-based hires as independent contractors of Convolving GmbH. NYC base preferred, US Eastern hours required.

05Nice to have

Useful, not required.

• Prior TPM experience at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, or an applied-AI consulting firm.
• Experience inside a regulated industry (finance, healthcare, legal, pharma).
• Reading knowledge of German, French, or Italian.
• Operational-engineering background (SRE, platform, internal tools) before moving to program management.

06What you’ll get

The package, plainly.

Comp. We pay senior market rates for the hub. Compensation is calibrated to New York market, not Swiss-discounted. Independent contractor engagement. Base plus a sprint-completion bonus tied to adoption, not utilisation.

Sprint model. Engagements are fixed-fee, 3 to 12 weeks. No retainer creep. No timesheet tracking. You finish a sprint, you take a week before the next one starts.

Training budget. Annual USD 6,000 for conferences, courses, or paid research time on a question that matters to your function or to the firm.

The work itself. One engagement at a time, with the room to push back on the design and own the artifact end-to-end.

07How to apply

One short note. No long form.

Send a CV and a short note (3 to 5 sentences) on a workflow you have personally seen broken at a previous employer. Tell us what the controls were, where judgement entered the work, and what a redesign would have had to honour. We read every note.