Staff/Sr Staff Technical Program Manager, Hardware Systems

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About the role

Lightmatter is leading the revolution in AI data center infrastructure, enabling the next giant leaps in human progress. The company invented the world’s first 3D-stacked photonics engine, Passage™, capable of connecting thousands to millions of processors at the speed of light in extreme-scale data centers for the most advanced AI and HPC workloads. Lightmatter raised $400 million in its Series D round, reaching a valuation of $4.4 billion. We will continue to accelerate the development of data center photonics and grow every department at Lightmatter! If you're passionate about tackling complex challenges, making an impact, and being an expert in your craft, join our team of brilliant scientists, engineers, and accomplished industry leaders. Lightmatter is (re)inventing the future of computing with light! We are hiring a Sr Technical Program Manager (TPM) to drive program execution across Lightmatter's Hardware Systems team. You will drive schedules, resource planning, priorities, and cross-functional alignment for all projects and activities within the team - spanning electrical, mechanical, and system engineering.. You will work closely with internal teams such as SI, PI, SW, supply chain, and with external partners, including contract manufacturers, PCB and sheet metal fabricators, assembly houses, and other suppliers, to keep programs on track from early design through production. In this role, you will manage dependencies and trade-offs across concurrent workstreams, facilitate alignment across internal and external stakeholders, and maintain program visibility for engineering leadership. Your scope covers the full hardware development lifecycle, from design through production, including the engineering support programs, test infrastructure, and tooling that keep the broader team moving. You will also serve as the team's primary program interface to broader organizational programs, ensuring that schedule changes, material commitments, and engineering status are communicated accurately and on time to cross-functional program stakeholders. This is a hands-on role that combines strong program management fundamentals with a working knowledge of hardware engineering. You will be equally at home in a design review, a supplier call, a resource planning discussion, and an executive status update. You will also need to thrive in a fast-moving environment where requirements evolve, priorities shift, and not every process is fully established, and bring the clarity and structure that turns that ambiguity into forward progress. Responsibilities • Own program coordination across all HW Systems activities: maintain an integrated schedule across all concurrent projects and workstreams, surface priority conflicts, and drive resolution of resource contention with engineering leads. • Drive cross-functional alignment between HW Systems and other teams: setting agendas, facilitating meetings, capturing decisions, communicating delays and risks, and relentlessly following up on action items • Manage team-wide resource loading and capacity visibility, partnering with engineering leads to flag overallocation risks and drive trade-offs discussions across concurrent programs • Build and maintain integrated program schedules that reflect hardware development realities - bring-up milestones, NPI phases, EVT/DVT/PVT gates, and cross-team dependencies • Own program scope that lives outside formal project charters: tester boards, demos, lab fixtures, calibration equipment, and internal engineering tools that teams depend on but that would otherwise lack dedicated ownership • Coordinate material flow within the HW Systems team: track component orders, PCB fab runs, PCBA and mechanical assemblies, and engineering samples; partner with supply

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