Senior Technical Program Manager

About the studio

We're the studio behind the artist BREAKFAST. We design and build his robotic sculptures for the Venice Biennale, Rockefeller Center, the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas, Tiffany & Co. in New York, Dubai and Seoul, and private collections around the world. The largest is the world's largest kinetic sculpture: 53 feet wide, nearly 3,000 motorized tiles driven by live wind and tide data, aboard a Royal Caribbean cruise ship. No screens, no projectors. Each piece is hundreds to thousands of motors, built to run for a decade with nobody watching it, and every board, line of firmware and bracket is designed and built by 17 people in our studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

See them move: https://theartistbreakfast.com/works

The role

You're the artist's person on the ground with our design and engineering team. Once or twice a week you sit with the artist, hear what matters right now (it changes), and turn it into a plan: what's in, what moves, what the real dates are. Then you go make it happen with a small team of senior mechanical, electrical, firmware, software and industrial-design people who are very good and very busy. You don't do the engineering, but you understand it well enough that nobody has to simplify it for you.

This is probably someone eight to twelve years into a career as a TPM, producer or program manager on physical products (robotics, consumer hardware, instruments, vehicles) who has run cross-discipline builds and is good at it, and who is starting to wonder whether they want to do the same thing at a bigger company forever. We care more about whether you're sharp, organised and direct than about your title.

What you'll own

• The schedule for every piece in the building, from first sketch through install, in Asana. Nothing lives in your head.
• Estimates. When an engineer says three weeks, you understand the work well enough to ask why, and to know when it's really two or really six.
• The weekly rhythm (priorities, check-ins, blockers) so the team always knows what's next and the artist always knows where things stand, without having to ask.
• Saying the hard thing early. A date that's going to slip is reported the day you know, with options, not the day it's due.
• Clients and fabricators when the project needs it, through delivery and install.

What you bring

• You've personally run the schedule and the Asana (or equivalent) for multi-discipline hardware builds that shipped on dates.
• Fluency across at least two of: mechanical, electrical, firmware, software, industrial design. Breadth over depth.
• Writing that is short, specific and honest.
• Evidence you manage up as well as down: you tell the person you report to things they don't want to hear.

Nice to have

• An engineering background you stepped out of.
• Small teams where you were the only PM.
• Any pull toward art, design, music, or making things for their own sake. No art background needed.

The basics

• Full-time, on-site at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with ~15% travel for installs.
• $150,000–$200,000 base depending on experience, plus an annual profit-share pool that every full-time person at the studio participates in.
• Health, dental and vision insurance; 401k; open vacation.

How to apply

Apply on our site (the Apply button takes you there). The "What makes you right for this job?" question is the part we read, so answer it in your own words.