The posting
Technical Program Manager
About Transfyr
Transfyr is building physical AI for science.
Why is it that a professional athlete has dramatically more information about every play they make than a scientist has about the cause of any experimental failure? Science has no film room, no instant replay. Instead, a protocol says what was meant to happen. A publication is a lossy record of what might have worked. But all the small decisions and invisible actions that determine whether an experiment succeeds, fails, or transfers to the next lab often disappear the moment the work is done or a scientist leaves.
That missing record is why it has been so hard to automate the physical work of science. It’s why training still remains dependent on scarce, one-to-one apprenticeship. It’s why tech transfer typically requires expensive troubleshooting and is one of the biggest causes of drug launch delays. It’s why scientists struggle to distinguish between biological noise and process variability.
We’re changing that. Transfyr builds physical AI systems that capture real scientific work and turn it into a high-fidelity, machine-readable record of execution and analysis of where process variability is impacting results. In doing so, we are also building the world’s largest commercial dataset on real-world scientific execution. The result is infrastructure that helps teams learn from failures, transfer hard-won know-how, train the next generation of scientists, and give models and robots the grounded data they need to be useful in the real world.
We’re tackling some of the hardest problems at the intersection of frontier science, perception, machine learning, and robotics and have significant traction. We’re backed by a $25M seed round, are collaborating with the largest frontier AI labs, and our advisors include Chris Ré (Stanford), David Baker (Nobel winning UW professor), Kevin Weil (fmr CPO at OpenAI), Steve Quake (Stanford biophysicist), Ken Frazier (fmr CEO of Merck), and Jakob Uszkoreit (CEO of Inceptive and author of “Attention Is All You Need”).
We’re unapologetically ambitious and pragmatic. If you want to work on the hardest problems in the most important industry on earth, join us.
Want to learn more? Read our launch letter here.
The Role
Technical Program Managers at Transfyr turn complex, cross-functional work into successful scientific and customer outcomes.
You will drive the day-to-day execution and delivery of commercial programs and important internal initiatives. You will connect Scientific Operations, AI/ML, software, perception, hardware, and business teams; translate goals into milestones and owners; manage budgets and dependencies; surface risks before they become surprises; and keep technical work aligned with the outcome the customer or company actually needs. Ultimately, you’re responsible for program success.
You will also serve as a key interface with external stakeholders. You will coordinate day-to-day communication between organizations, maintain technical documentation, turn customer needs into prioritized product requirements, and help the team make good tradeoffs as new information appears. The best program plan is not the one that looks perfect at kickoff—it is the one that keeps a changing technical program pointed toward a useful result.
This is not a passive project-management role. You will not only schedule meetings and report status. You will learn enough science and technology to ask hard questions, help teams resolve ambiguity, step into operating gaps, and do hands-on work when that is what moves the program forward.
This role is in-person in Cambridge, MA, with travel to customer and partner sites as programs require.
A tip: While we welcome direct applications, we prefer warm introductions. If you’re really interested in Transfyr, we strongly recommend you get an introduction from someone who knows you well and whose opinion we’re likely to trust. And in general, the strongest way to get our attention is to show us what you have built, solved, or learned that is relevant to this role.
What you’ll accomplish with us:
- Design executable programs: Convert technical and commercial goals into clear workstreams, milestones, deliverables, budgets, decision points, and success metrics.
- Drive day-to-day delivery: Keep owners aligned, decisions moving, and critical work on track across scientific, software, AI/ML, hardware, data, and operational teams.
- Manage risks and dependencies: Identify technical, resource, budget, schedule, and customer risks early; frame the tradeoffs; and help the right people resolve them.
- Serve as the customer interface: Build trust through clear communication, accurate documentation, dependable follow-through, and honest handling of changes or setbacks.
- Connect technical teams: Develop enough context across domains to ask useful questions, expose mismatched assumptions, and help experts work together without creating another layer of bureaucracy.
- Translate delivery into product direction: Capture customer needs, field evidence, and repeated program friction as clear requirements that inform Transfyr’s product and R&D priorities.
- Create operational clarity: Maintain plans, decision records, technical documentation, budgets, data-quality metrics, and program health views that make the true state of the work easy to understand.
- Improve tools and workflows: Help teams adopt, document, and mature the internal systems they use to run experiments, manage data, track quality, and deliver programs.
- Build the delivery playbook: Turn one-off lessons into reusable program structures, templates, operating rhythms, and standards that make future deployments faster and more reliable.
- Step into the gap: Support scientific execution, hardware testing, data quality, product requirements, partnerships, operating infrastructure, or other urgent work when the program needs it.
Who you are
- High agency. You do not wait for every dependency to resolve itself. You create the structure, conversation, or decision needed to move.
- Biased toward action. You value useful plans, rapid feedback, and visible progress over process for its own sake.
- A dot connector. You see how people, technical choices, scientific workflows, budgets, and customer expectations affect one another.
- Technically curious. You do not need to be the deepest expert in every domain, but you learn enough to ask thoughtful questions and recognize when something does not add up.
- Customer-accountable. You care about the delivered result, not only whether the internal checklist was completed.
- Calm under pressure. You can handle changing requirements, missed milestones, and competing priorities without losing clarity or trust.
- Clear, direct communicator. You surface risks early, document decisions, and adapt your communication to technical and nontechnical audiences.
- Low ego, high standards. You help experts do their best work, take on unglamorous tasks when needed, and care more about the outcome than credit.
- Intense. You care deeply about the mission, work hard when it matters, and help a small team do outsized work.
What you know:
- Technical program delivery: Experience leading complex programs that span research, engineering, operations, customers, or multiple organizations.
- Program design: Ability to translate an ambiguous goal into workstreams, milestones, resource needs, budgets, risks, decision gates, and measurable outcomes.
- Cross-functional execution: A record of moving work across teams with different vocabularies, incentives, and technical constraints without relying on formal authority.
- Scientific or technical fluency: Experience working closely with scientists, engineers, or other technical experts and the ability to learn unfamiliar systems quickly.
- Customer and alliance management: Experience serving as a dependable point of contact, coordinating delivery across organizations, and handling scope changes or difficult tradeoffs.
- Operational judgment: Ability to distinguish a true blocker from background noise, escalate at the right time, and make progress when the plan is incomplete.
- Documentation and communication: Strong writing and the discipline to maintain decision records, technical documentation, plans, and status views people can actually use.
- Analytical fluency: Comfort with budgets, resource planning, metrics, data-quality indicators, and evidence-based prioritization.
Other things we like to see:
- Hands-on scientific experience, especially in a wet lab or experimental R&D environment
- Experience delivering AI/ML, automation, robotics, data, or physical product programs
- Experience in a startup or another small, flat organization where responsibilities change quickly
- Experience building a technical program-management or program-operations function from zero to one
- Experience supporting external scientific collaborations, deployments, or technology transfer
- A pattern of leaving teams with better systems, not only a completed project
The basics:
- Competitive compensation (cash + equity)
- Full benefits (low/no-cost health insurance options, HSA, 401(k) with matching, lunch subsidy, etc.)
- In-person work at our Cambridge, MA headquarters, with travel to customer and partner sites as programs require
