RnD Program Management

About the Role:

A product/technology begins from the mind and the mind is the product of the environment it is in. The mind thinks with what it experiences from its environment. An organization is the converging environment for such wide variety of minds to come together and contribute their ideas.

Yet every organization underestimates the amount of Facilitation and Organizing that is needed to ensure a conducive flow of Ideasbetween minds.

We are looking for an Engineering/Technical Program Manager who will own the engineering delivery system and the people performance diagnostic layer across CynLr's multi-disciplinary engineering organization. This is not a project management role that runs Agile ceremonies. This is a role for someone who can design engineering processes from first principles, build objective performance assessment frameworks, diagnose systemic bottlenecks across hardware-software-research workflows, and drive alignment across teams with genuine interpersonal skill.

You will design & execute the processes, frameworks, and diagnostics that allow CynLr's engineering teams to deliver with clarity, speed, and accountability across every stream.

Your Primary Contributions

1. Engineering Process Design & Delivery

• Design and own the end-to-end product delivery process from concept through design, development, testing, and release across hardware, firmware, software, and research streams.
• Map inter-stream dependencies, tool workflows, and external/internal bottlenecks and resolve them before they become blockers.
• Set up milestones with built-in assessment checkpoints for product development, projects, and design work.
• Design and manage the tool workflow for product delivery (Asana and engineering management tools), driving adoption and discipline across teams.
• Build a distinct R&D management workflow for research and exploratory projects separate from routine software development processes.

2. Engineering Review Process

• Design the engineering review process for Design, Development, and Research across all engineering streams.
• Define review metrics, assess process effectiveness, and refine iteratively.
• Organize and conduct review sessions where engineering leads assess the work. You will design, structure, and run the process.

3. Performance Diagnostics & Assessment

• Design an analytics-driven continuous assessment process by weaving diagnostic probes into engineering workflows making performance reviews objective rather than subjective.
• Structure performance assessment across three dimensions: Individual, Team, and Process ensuring root causes are diagnosable across all three.
• Diagnose performance issues to their root: Process gap Tooling gap Motivation Skill gap Design specific remedies for each.
• Formulate monthly performance reports and conduct quarterly assessment programs in collaboration with HR.

4. Resource & Project Planning

• Maintain resource maps, skill maps, and performance grades and use them actively for project planning and allocation decisions.
• Organize individual engineers calendars with categorized task blocks and drive adherence.
• Manage project timelines, dependencies, and delivery commitments across streams.

5. Team Alignment & People Skills

• Drive alignment across engineering teams not through authority, but through clarity, negotiation, and building shared understanding.
• Handle individual negotiations, identify morale bottlenecks, and resolve conflicts across teams.
• Build team cohesion and soft-skill development as a deliberate practice, not a cultural afterthought.

What Will You Do

You will augment Founder's Vision and make CynLr's engineering organization legible to itself, to leadership, and to the people inside it.

You will:

• Translate ambiguity into structure without losing the nuance that makes deep-tech hard.
• Surface bottlenecks before they surface themselves as missed deadlines.
• Build systems that make good engineering behavior the path of least resistance.
• Diagnose performance problems at their root and not just at their symptom.
• Hold the delivery system together across hardware, firmware, software, and research without becoming a bottleneck yourself.

You are not expected to be a domain expert in every engineering stream. You are expected to understand how they interlock and to design & execute accordingly.

What This Role Is Not

• Not an Agile/Scrum Master role. We do not use template frameworks. You will design processes from first principles based on what the engineering organization actually needs.
• Not a passive PMO. You will not track Gantt charts from the sidelines. You will actively diagnose, intervene, and drive systemic improvements.
• Not a pure HR role. While you will collaborate with HR on performance programs, your primary orientation is engineering operations and process design.

What Will You Need to Do This Role Well

• At least 3–5 years of owning engineering processes end-to-end — not just participating in them.
• Strong understanding of multiple engineering streams (hardware, firmware, software, research) and their interlinkings dependency patterns, bottleneck dynamics, and cross-stream risk.
• Demonstrated experience designing delivery processes, milestone frameworks, and assessment systems from scratch
• Hands-on experience with engineering program management tools (Asana strongly preferred).
• Analytical mindset with the ability to design diagnostic probes and data-driven assessment frameworks.
• Strong interpersonal skills: conflict resolution, individual negotiation, team alignment.

Experience That Will Accelerate You

• Engineering degree with a technical career foundation before moving into program or process roles.
• Experience in deep-tech, robotics, embedded systems, automotive, aerospace/defense, industrial automation, medical devices, or semiconductor equipment
• Experience in organizations with 30–150 engineers where process had to be built, not just followed.
• Comfort operating in a founder-driven environment with high ownership expectations and minimal bureaucratic scaffolding.
• Background in a product company that ships integrated hardware-software products.

How Will You Do It

This role resists templating by design. When we build a new industry from Scratch, we can't do by borrowing tools from other professions/industries.

You will operate by:

• Studying the engineering organization as a system before intervening in it.

• Asking sharp clarifying questions before designing solutions.

• Building your own frameworks for tracking, diagnostics, and follow-through.

• Knowing when to enforce structure and when structure itself is the bottleneck.

• Learning from feedback quickly and evolving your approach as the organization grows.

Success here comes from systems thinking, engineering understanding, and the discipline to build things that outlast your direct involvement.

Team Structure

The Technical Program Manager operates within the Founder's Office, embedded directly into the engineering organization.

While the TPM works closely with the founder(s), the role interfaces continuously with:

• Engineering leads

• HR and Talent, for performance programs and people-related interventions

• Finance and Operations, for resource planning and project budgeting

• External vendors and tooling partners, where applicable

The TPM owns process design and delivery hygiene across all engineering streams — acting as the connective layer that keeps multi-disciplinary teams aligned without creating dependency on a single coordination point.

About CynLr

Just like a baby's brain, CynLr Visual Intelligence stack makes Robots to instinctively see & pick any object under any ambience, without any training. (a demo video link).

From fitting a screw to removing object out of its the plastic wrapper to automating the assembly of a car/gadget - every such object handling task that involves adapting on the fly is not prior trainable & thereby remains non-automatable across the industries. CynLr builds a stack of Micro RL blocks called Sensing & Action Primitives, using which a High Level Task can be composed.

CynLr's OI enables an universal alternative to custom automation thus simplifying factory lines into modular LEGO-like Universal-factories that can be rapidly reconfigured as products change.

CynLr s Vision and ML stacks are deeply inspired by neuroscience, modelling how biological vision understands shape, geometry, and interaction rather than appearance alone. To support this, CynLr builds its hardware, sensors, compute pipelines, and learning stacks from scratch, tightly coupling perception, decision-making, and action.

We are a deep-tech robotics company at the intersection of computer vision, real-time control systems, and precision hardware, headquartered in Bengaluru with a Swiss entity. Our engineering spans optics, embedded systems, firmware, real-time software, mechanical design, and applied research.