VP of Engineering
San Francisco, CA - USA
Job Summary
Rime is a foundation modeling company that builds voice AI for enterprises running customer experiences at scale. Our models are purpose-built for high-volume conversational deployments engineered for the accuracy performance and deployment flexibility that production environments actually demand.
We started from a different premise than the rest of the field: build voice AI for human connection not slop. Before we trained a single model we built our own corpus: full-duplex studio-quality conversational speech of normal people recorded and annotated by linguists. Its why our models are unparalleled in naturalism and its why enterprises pick Rime when pilots need to make it to production.
Were hiring Rimes first Technical Program Manager. Engineering is growing and the coordination work priorities timelines IC alignment external triage needs an owner. This isnt a process-management role. Its a role for someone who thinks in systems can read a codebase and wants to be in the room (and the repo) where technical decisions get made. Youll work directly with engineering leads founders and the modeling team to keep Rime moving in the same direction at the same time.
Engineering roadmap: tracking initiatives across all teams ensuring alignment between company objectives and engineering blueprints. Driving the company roadmap while giving engineers liberty to do what they excel at.
Priority triage: fielding requests from customers sales marketing and leadership and translating them into clear sequenced tasks so ICs stay focused with aggressive prioritization.
Bottleneck identification: identifying execution blockages inefficient information channels unrealistic timelines; and if necessary do some ad-hoc coding to glue things together.
Cross-functional reconciliation: Be the cross-functional coordinator across engineering roles build trust across the company by soliciting feedback and proposing concrete action plans.
Tooling hygiene: using and managing project management and issue tracking tools as needed to facilitate work coordination.
Public documentation: you will be owning.
Compliance program: owning the compliance burndown in coordination with infrastructure and engineering.
2 years or more experience in program or project management coordinating technical work across multiple engineering workstreams.
Comfort diving into codebases you can read a PR understand a system diagram and ask the questions in the smart way. If necessary you head in and hack something with the help of LLMs.
Strong written communication and async-first working style.
You know the difference between a roadmap and a time-scoped plan and when each is appropriate.
Trust engineers expertise in their areas but still hold them accountable without becoming an obstacle.
When something small is blocking progress and you can fix it yourself you do.
Experience building the TPM function from scratch at an early-stage startup.
Familiarity (and excitement!) with ML or voice AI systems.
Experience owning compliance or security programs.
Background in working in SaaS companies with a significant amount of customer-facing roles.
Youll be the connective tissue of a high-output engineering team at a critical growth stage.
Direct access to founders and engineering leads no layers.
The role expands as you prove what it can be.
Meaningful equity upside.
High ownership high standards low bureaucracy.
SF / Bay Area.
Required Experience:
Exec
About Company
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