Technical Program Manager, Flight Software

Los Angelesfull timeOn Site

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mid

$165k–$235k

H1B: no

K2 Space The Technical Program Manager at K2 Space owns and maintains the software development schedule for flight and ground software teams. This role tracks progress, manages dependencies, and mitigates risks to keep satellite software development on schedule.

Responsibilities

*This role is onsite at our Torrance office*
Own and maintain the software team's development schedule, including sprint/release plans, integration milestones, and dependencies on hardware, test, and other software subsystems.
Track day-to-day progress against the schedule, identify slips early, and drive resolution of blockers with the responsible engineers and leads.
Coordinate flight & ground software milestones (integration drops, flight readiness reviews, customer emulators) with systems, avionics, AI&T, and mission operations to keep the broader program on schedule.
Maintain the risk register for flight software: flag emerging risks, drive mitigation plans, and know when and how to escalate a schedule or scope decision to leadership.
Run and facilitate recurring flight software program reviews and planning sessions — keeping them focused, actionable, and tied to schedule commitments.
Translate engineering status into clear, concise updates for engineering leadership, program management, and customers — tailoring the level of detail to the audience.
Partner with software leads to right-size process (ticketing, sprint cadence, release planning) so schedule tracking scales with the team without slowing engineers down.
Support resource and capacity planning for the flight software team, helping forecast staffing needs against upcoming program milestones.
Continuously improve how the team plans and tracks work as K2 scales production across multiple concurrent satellite programs.

Qualification

Bachelor's degree in engineeringComfort operating in a fast-paced

Required

Bachelor's degree in engineering, computer science, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
5+ years of technical program or project management experience working directly with software engineering teams, ideally on embedded, flight, or other high-reliability software.
Demonstrated ability to build and maintain detailed schedules, track dependencies, and keep a software team on track against firm external milestones (e.g., integration, test, launch dates).
Comfort working closely with software engineers day-to-day with enough technical fluency to understand what's actually blocking progress, not just what's reported as blocked.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to give leadership a clear, honest schedule picture without diluting or overstating risk.
Comfort operating in a fast-paced, aggressive-timeline environment with shifting priorities and high ambiguity.

Preferred

Experience program-managing flight software, embedded software, or firmware for aerospace, satellite, or other high-reliability systems.
Background as a software engineer or in a technical role, sufficient to read a schedule critically and ask the right questions of the team.
Familiarity with modern software program tooling (e.g., Jira, Confluence, Git-based workflows, CI/CD) and experience building schedule/status dashboards.
Experience coordinating software milestones against hardware integration and test schedules on a multidisciplinary program.
Experience supporting resource and capacity planning for an engineering team.