About Cadre AI
Cadre AI is an AI strategy and integration firm that builds production AI systems for companies like private equity, wholesale lending, real estate, SaaS, and more. We do not build decks about what AI could do. We ship systems that move revenue, compress costs, and automate the work that used to take entire teams.
The Role
The Technical Program Manager is the operational backbone of Cadre AI's Product, Research, and Engineering (PRE) team. You sit at the intersection of product scope and engineering execution, ensuring that every build stays on timeline, every blocker gets resolved before it stalls delivery, and every PRD translates cleanly into structured, executable work. You report to the Head of Client Engineering and work alongside PRE leadership to keep the engineering machine running with precision across all active workstreams.
Your day-to-day is a mix of validating product requirements, breaking complex builds into scoped sprints, tracking engineering progress across multiple concurrent projects, and anticipating the dependencies and resource needs that would otherwise derail timelines. You are not client-facing; the client delivery teams own that relationship. Your job is to make sure that when a delivery team needs something built, PRE delivers it on time, on spec, and without surprises.
This role is for someone who has built products themselves and understands what it takes to ship. You know what a clean PRD looks like, you know when a scope is missing a critical detail, and you know the difference between an engineer who is blocked and one who needs a clearer requirement. You do not wait for things to break. You see the problem three steps ahead, and you have already started solving it.
What You'll Do
PRD Validation and Technical Scoping
- Review and validate incoming PRDs to ensure technical requirements are complete, scope boundaries are explicit, and success criteria are defined before any engineering work begins.
- Identify gaps in product scope, including missing integration requirements, undefined edge cases, and unclear acceptance criteria, and resolve them with PRE leadership before work enters a sprint.
- Translate validated PRDs into structured task breakdowns in ClickUp with time estimates, accurate assignees, dependencies mapped, and subtasks scoped to a single-day maximum.
- Maintain a clear definition of what is in scope and out of scope for every active project, and enforce those boundaries throughout the build cycle.
Timeline Management and Sprint Execution
- Own the end-to-end engineering timeline for all active PRE workstreams, ensuring every task has accurate time estimates, due dates, and assignees at all times.
- Run sprint planning and standups for PRE, setting agendas in advance, keeping sessions focused on blockers and progress, and ensuring every meeting produces documented action items with owners and deadlines.
- Monitor sprint health continuously, identifying tasks at risk of slipping and surfacing them to PRE leadership with context and a recommended path forward before they impact delivery commitments.
- Enforce time estimation discipline across all engineering tasks, ensuring estimates roll up accurately to project-level timelines and capacity reports reflect reality.
Technical Unblocking and Dependency Management
- Track technical dependencies across all active builds, including API keys, platform access, third-party integrations, and shared infrastructure, and ensure engineers have what they need before they need it.
- Anticipate blockers by understanding the technical requirements of each workstream well enough to predict what resources, access, or decisions an engineer will need in the coming sprint and initiate those requests proactively.
- Coordinate with PRE leadership on capacity needs when a timeline requires additional engineering resources, providing the context and data needed to make allocation decisions quickly.
- Maintain a running dependency tracker across all active projects so that no build stalls because a prerequisite was missed or a handoff was dropped.
Engineering Workflow and ClickUp Hygiene
- Own ClickUp health across all PRE workstreams, ensuring tasks are properly structured with accurate dates, assignees, time estimates, and status updates that reflect current reality.
- Capture action items from standups, Slack threads, and internal syncs and convert them into ClickUp tasks with accurate owners and due dates within 24 hours.
- Move incomplete sprint tasks forward, close or archive stale items, and maintain milestone visibility so that PRE leadership always has an accurate picture of where every project stands.
- Flag process gaps and workflow inefficiencies to PRE leadership with specific recommendations for how to resolve them.
Cross-Functional Coordination with Client Delivery Teams
- Serve as the primary operational interface between PRE and client delivery teams, ensuring delivery-originated engineering requests are captured, scoped, and prioritized within PRE's sprint cadence.
- Translate client delivery needs into engineering-ready requirements, bridging the gap between what a delivery team lead needs shipped and what an engineer needs to build it.
- Keep delivery teams informed on engineering progress, timeline changes, and any risks to committed deliverables without requiring team leads to chase status updates.
- Coordinate handoffs between PRE and delivery teams when builds are complete, ensuring that testing, deployment, and client delivery happen on schedule.
What You Need to Succeed
- 5+ years of experience in technical program management, technical project management, or engineering operations in a software, SaaS, or consulting environment where you were responsible for keeping engineering teams on timeline across multiple concurrent workstreams.
- Hands-on product building experience; you have personally built or shipped a software product end to end, including UI, backend, integrations, and testing, and that experience gives you the ability to evaluate whether a PRD is complete and whether an engineering estimate is realistic.
- Strong understanding of the software product lifecycle, including requirements definition, design, build, testing, and deployment, with the ability to identify where a project is in that cycle and what needs to happen next.
- Proficient with ClickUp or a comparable project management platform, including complex task hierarchies, custom fields, sprint workflows, automations, and capacity reporting; you know how to make a tool enforce process rather than just document it.
- Technically literate enough to understand engineering blockers, evaluate scope complexity, and have productive conversations with developers about APIs, integrations, infrastructure dependencies, and deployment pipelines without needing every concept translated.
- Exceptionally organised with a bias toward structured systems; you maintain accurate timelines, dependency maps, and sprint boards not because someone asks you to, but because you cannot function without them.
- Proactive by default; you do not surface a problem without a recommended solution, and you do not wait for a blocker to become a crisis before acting on it.
- Clear, concise written communicator who can synthesize engineering status across multiple workstreams into updates that PRE leadership and delivery team leads can act on immediately.
- Comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift, new projects spin up quickly, and the ability to reprioritize without losing track of existing commitments is essential.
- Familiarity with AI/ML development workflows, LLM-based application architectures, or applied AI systems is a strong advantage; you do not need to build models, but understanding how AI products are scoped, tested, and deployed will make you significantly more effective in this role.
What Sets You Apart
- You have been the person keeping an engineering team on track before. You know what it feels like to own a timeline that depends on other people's work, and you have developed the systems and instincts to make that work consistently.
- You have validated product requirements and caught the gaps that would have derailed a build two weeks later. You know what a good PRD looks like, and you are not afraid to send one back when it is incomplete.
- You understand engineering well enough to anticipate blockers, not just react to them. When an engineer tells you they are stuck, you already have context on why and a plan to get them unblocked.
- You have strong opinions about what good engineering operations looks like, including sprint structure, task hygiene, estimation practices, and dependency tracking, and the confidence to enforce those standards with a team.
Why Cadre AI
- Real ownership. You own the operational execution of PRE's engineering output. When timelines hold and builds ship clean, that is your work.
- AI-native culture. We do not just build AI for clients. We use it to run our own operations. You will work with people who are as obsessed with the tools as you are.
- Access to the frontier. Through partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI, you will be among the first to experiment with new models and capabilities.
- Upside. We are bootstrapped, profitable, and growing fast. Early team members share in the success they help create.
- No bureaucracy. Small teams. Clear accountability. The best idea wins, regardless of who says it.
Cadre AI is building the future of how companies adopt and operate AI. The best engineering operations people make complex delivery look effortless. If that is how you work, we want to talk.
Compensation
The base pay range for this role is $3,000 – $4,000 per month.