Principal, Technical Program Manager

Overview

Founding Technical Program Manager for a newly formed platform team within Walmart's GDF (AI & Data), standing up program structure, delivery cadence, and governance from scratch.

What you'll do

• Serve as the founding TPM for a newly created platform team, standing up program structure, delivery cadence, and governance where none previously existed.
• Manage large, cross-cutting software/platform development programs end-to-end, partnering closely with architects and engineering leaders on architectural decision-making.
• Define goals, stage gates, critical delivery paths, and key deliverables for programs spanning multiple workstreams, dependencies, timelines, and resource constraints.
• Build and maintain strong stakeholder relationships across GDF, AI & Data, and downstream consuming teams, driving alignment on roles, responsibilities, and delivery cadences.
• Establish a resource capacity allocation process and tooling to bring planning rigor to a fast-moving, newly formed org.
• Drive efficient engineering resource utilization; simplify and clarify priorities into plans with milestones suitable for advance planning and executive buy-in.
• Identify and champion AI-augmented program management practices (e.g., using AI to auto-summarize status updates, flag at-risk milestones from ticket/PR signal, or generate stakeholder-ready reporting) and work with tooling/eng leads to implement them.
• Navigate setbacks and ambiguity with strong problem-solving and decision-making skills in a 0→1 team environment.
• Represent the platform team in leadership/executive reviews, translating technical delivery status into business-relevant narrative.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent; 15+ years of overall technical experience, including 10+ years in a Technical Program Management leadership role delivering software programs with aggressive schedules and significant business impact.
• Proven experience standing up new programs/teams from scratch, comfortable defining process, cadence, and governance rather than just operating within an existing one.
• Strong leadership skills, with the ability to effectively manage and motivate a team of technical program managers and engineers.
• Experience supporting and executing a large software/platform portfolio while collaborating with multiple business stakeholders.
• Solid grounding in system/platform design concepts, architecture, technical design, services, APIs, and data platform technologies (data pipelines, lakehouse architectures, governance frameworks).
• AI-forward program management skillset: practical experience using GenAI tools (e.g., Copilot-style assistants, internal LLM platforms) to accelerate program artifacts such as status reports, risk summaries, requirement drafts, and meeting-notes-to-action-items.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted meeting intelligence (e.g., auto-transcription/summarization of Teams/Zoom calls) and using it to close the loop on decisions and action items faster.
• Working understanding of how AI/ML and agentic systems get built and deployed (MLOps basics, model lifecycle, data quality dependencies).
• Curiosity and judgment to identify where AI genuinely helps a program (signal, not noise) versus where it is a distraction.
• Ability to build positive relationships with product managers, translating target personas and business needs into features/user stories engineers can act on.
• Strong sense of ownership and accountability, with a love for data and solving complex, ambiguous problems.
• Expertise in change and risk management methodologies, project tracking tools, dashboards, and executive reporting.
• Excellent verbal and written communicator, equally adept communicating upward, outward, and downward.
• Deep hands-on familiarity with JIRA, JIRA Align, Big Picture, Airtable, or equivalent program tooling.
• Minimum qualifications: Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, or related area and 6 years' experience in engineering, engineering program management, technical program management, product management, or related area. Option 2: 8 years' experience in engineering, engineering program management, technical program management, product management, or related area.

Details

• Location: Block-1, Prestige Tech Pacific Park, Sy No. 38/1, Outer Ring Rd, Kadubeesanahalli, India (Bangalore office).
• Work mode: based in the Bangalore office for daily work, with flexibility for associates to manage personal lives.