What are the responsibilities and job description for the Technical Program Manager, Digital position at Northwood?
About Northwood:
Northwood is a modern space infrastructure company focused on connecting space and Earth. The world runs on space. Space will run on Northwood. Our global ground network ensures that missions ranging from national security, to global connectivity, to disaster response can unlock their full potential and operate every day without fail.
Role
Northwood is building a global network of satellite ground stations, and the Digital org spans backend, frontend, DSP, FPGA, embedded, and infrastructure. As these products run in parallel against hard customer commitments. This role owns the horizontal layer: real-time visibility into engineering delivery risk across the Digital portfolio, and the processes and tooling that let the org execute coherently.
This is not a role that owns technical direction or schedules IC time; that authority stays with engineers and functional leads. It is the role that holds the integrated delivery picture, surfaces and resolves cross-team risk before it becomes a missed pass, and gives mission management and customers a straight answer on where things stand.
Responsibilities
Northwood is a modern space infrastructure company focused on connecting space and Earth. The world runs on space. Space will run on Northwood. Our global ground network ensures that missions ranging from national security, to global connectivity, to disaster response can unlock their full potential and operate every day without fail.
Role
Northwood is building a global network of satellite ground stations, and the Digital org spans backend, frontend, DSP, FPGA, embedded, and infrastructure. As these products run in parallel against hard customer commitments. This role owns the horizontal layer: real-time visibility into engineering delivery risk across the Digital portfolio, and the processes and tooling that let the org execute coherently.
This is not a role that owns technical direction or schedules IC time; that authority stays with engineers and functional leads. It is the role that holds the integrated delivery picture, surfaces and resolves cross-team risk before it becomes a missed pass, and gives mission management and customers a straight answer on where things stand.
Responsibilities
- Maintain real-time visibility into engineering delivery risk across Digital products: modem pipelines, beamforming, telemetry, scheduling, and ground-station software
- Own the software development lifecycle across these products: build and maintain execution plans, dependency maps, and delivery schedules, and drive clarity on priorities, ownership, technical debt, and operational readiness
- Build the processes, tooling, and visibility that let teams coordinate without relying on proximity and ad-hoc alignment
- Identify and drive resolution of integration risks across the hardware/software and cross-domain boundaries; escalate to engineering leadership when team-level resolution fails
- Coordinate testing and validation across simulation, staging, lab, and deployed environments
- Partner with mission management and participate directly in customer meetings, translating engineering state into an honest read on delivery risk for programs and customers
- Flag staffing gaps to the relevant functional leads, who make the staffing call
- Partner with engineering leadership to improve development velocity, operational reliability, and deployment readiness
- 5 years in Technical Program Management, Systems Engineering, or technical engineering leadership
- Strong technical understanding of software systems and distributed infrastructure
- Experience working with DSP, RF, embedded, or real-time systems teams
- Track record of building delivery processes and tooling, not just running existing ones
- Experience with SDRs, modem systems, satellite communications, wireless, or telecom infrastructure
- Familiarity with DSP concepts such as filtering, synchronization, modulation/demodulation, channel estimation, or beamforming
- Experience coordinating FPGA, embedded Linux, or high-performance compute efforts
- Experience in customer-facing or program-interface roles
- Aerospace, defense, or mission-critical systems experience
- Familiarity with ITAR, classified systems, or regulated operational environments