Senior Technical Program Manager – AI Engineering Productivity

$153K - $310K Cupertino, CA, US Senior AI Engineering Manager

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Skills & Technologies

ClaudePrompt Engineering

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

Senior Technical Program Manager – AI Engineering Productivity

This role has been designed as ‘Hybrid’ with an expectation that you will work on average 2 days per week from an HPE office.Who We Are:

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge\-to\-cloud company advancing the way people live and work. We help companies connect, protect, analyze, and act on their data and applications wherever they live, from edge to cloud, so they can turn insights into outcomes at the speed required to thrive in today’s complex world. Our culture thrives on finding new and better ways to accelerate what’s next. We know varied backgrounds are valued and succeed here. We have the flexibility to manage our work and personal needs. We make bold moves, together, and are a force for good. If you are looking to stretch and grow your career our culture will embrace you. Open up opportunities with HPE.

Job Description:

We are seeking an experienced Senior Technical Program Manager – AI Engineering Productivity to drive AI\-powered software development productivity initiatives across our engineering organization.

Reporting to the VP of Engineering, this role will focus on accelerating engineering efficiency through adoption of AI\-assisted development tools, modern engineering workflows, and developer productivity platforms. The ideal candidate will partner closely with Development, QA, SRE, and Support teams to improve code delivery velocity, streamline engineering workflows, and drive measurable productivity gains across the software development lifecycle.

This highly visible role will lead cross\-functional AI initiatives, drive organization\-wide adoption of AI tooling, develop engineering productivity metrics and dashboards, and provide regular executive updates on roadmap progress, adoption trends, and business impact.

Responsibilities

  • Lead adoption and enablement programs for AI\-assisted development tools including coding assistants, workflow automation, and developer productivity platforms.
  • Partner with engineering teams to improve developer efficiency, code delivery velocity, testing workflows, and operational effectiveness.
  • Define and track engineering productivity metrics including AI adoption, code acceptance rates, unit test generation, workflow efficiency, and token utilization.
  • Drive development of dashboards and reporting systems to measure engineering productivity and AI usage trends.
  • Coordinate AI\-assisted workflow initiatives including test generation and engineering automation.
  • Drive AI\-assisted support and incident management workflows, including agent\-based Jira enrichment, runbook automation, log diagnostics, and RCA acceleration for customer\-reported issues and alerting events.
  • Establish and enforce AI tool usage governance, including cost management, token budget policies, usage anomaly detection, and guardrails against underutilization and token abuse across engineering teams.
  • Organize best\-practice sessions, brown bag trainings, and enablement programs to improve effective AI tool usage across engineering teams.
  • Provide executive\-level reporting on adoption trends, productivity improvements, roadmap progress, and optimization opportunities.

Required Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field.
  • 10\+ years of Technical Program Management or related experience in software engineering environments.
  • Experience driving large cross\-functional technical initiatives across engineering organizations.
  • Strong executive communication and stakeholder management skills.
  • Prior software engineering experience, with the ability to read, evaluate, and discuss code, AI\-generated outputs, and technical architecture decisions.
  • Experience with tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, Jira, GitHub, and MCP integrations.
  • Experience building productivity dashboards, metrics programs, and engineering reporting systems.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Understanding of developer workflows, CI/CD concepts, engineering operations, and software delivery processes.
  • Familiarity with agentic AI architectures, multi\-agent orchestration, and MCP\-based tool integrations for developer and SRE workflow automation.
  • Working knowledge of large language models, prompt engineering principles, model evaluation, and AI cost management or LLM procurement.

Desired Characteristics

  • Passion for improving developer productivity through AI and automation.
  • Strong technical curiosity and data\-driven mindset.
  • Ability to influence teams and drive adoption without direct authority.
  • Comfortable operating amid ambiguity in fast\-moving AI tooling environments, where standards, models, and best practices evolve rapidly.

What We Can Offer You:

Health \& Wellbeing

We strive to provide our team members and their loved ones with a comprehensive suite of benefits that supports their physical, financial and emotional wellbeing.

Personal \& Professional Development

We also invest in your career because the better you are, the better we all are. We have specific programs catered to helping you reach any career goals you have — whether you want to become a knowledge expert in your field or apply your skills to another division.

Unconditional Inclusion

We are unconditionally inclusive in the way we work and celebrate individual uniqueness. We know varied backgrounds are valued and succeed here. We have the flexibility to manage our work and personal needs. We make bold moves, together, and are a force for good.

Let's Stay Connected:

Follow @HPECareers on Instagram to see the latest on people, culture and tech at HPE.

\#unitedstatesJob:

EngineeringJob Level:

TCP\_05

"The expected salary/wage range for this position is provided below. Actual offer may vary from this range based upon geographic location, work experience, education/training, and/or skill level.

– United States of America: Annual Salary USD 153,500 \- 310,500 in California

The listed salary range reflects base salary. Variable incentives may also be offered."

Information about employee benefits offered in the US can be found at https://myhperewards.com/main/new\-hire\-enrollment.html

HPE is an Equal Employment Opportunity/ Veterans/Disabled/LGBT employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or any other protected category, and all decisions we make are made on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need. Our goal is to be one global team that is representative of our customers, in an inclusive environment where we can continue to innovate and grow together. Please click here: Equal Employment Opportunity.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is EEO Protected Veteran/ Individual with Disabilities.

HPE will comply with all applicable laws related to employer use of arrest and conviction records, including laws requiring employers to consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories.

Recruitment Fraud Alert

We have become aware of an increase in fraudulent recruitment activities in which individuals impersonate our company or authorized recruitment agencies to offer fake employment opportunities. These scams may occur through false websites, emails, social media, or chat\-based applications and often aim to obtain personal information or money. Please note that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), its direct and indirect subsidiaries and affiliated companies, and its authorized recruitment agencies/vendors will never charge a candidate a registration fee, hiring fee, or any other fee in connection with its recruitment and hiring process. We also never request personal information such as back account details, Social Security numbers, or national IDs via social media or chat applications.

All legitimate job opportunities will come through official company channels, and candidates are responsible for verifying the credentials of any third party claiming to represent the company. Any reliance on fraudulent communication is at the individual’s own risk, and HPE disclaims legal liability for any resulting damages. If you suspect recruitment fraud, do not share personal information or make any payments and report the incident to your local authorities immediately.

Salary Context

This $153K-$310K range is above the median for AI Engineering Manager roles in our dataset (median: $202K across 15 roles with salary data).

Role Details

Title Senior Technical Program Manager – AI Engineering Productivity
Location Cupertino, CA, US
Category AI Engineering Manager
Experience Senior
Salary $153K - $310K
Remote No

About This Role

This role sits at the intersection of AI and engineering, building systems that bring machine learning capabilities into production environments. The scope varies by company, but the common thread is applying AI technology to solve real business problems at scale. Most AI roles today require a combination of software engineering fundamentals and domain-specific ML knowledge, with the exact mix depending on the team's maturity and the product they're building.

The AI job market is evolving fast. New role categories emerge as companies figure out what they need to ship AI-powered products. What matters most is the ability to learn quickly, build working systems, and iterate based on real-world performance data. The specific title matters less than the skills you bring and the problems you can solve. Companies are past the experimentation phase and want engineers who can deliver production-quality systems that work reliably at scale.

Across the 3,823 AI roles we're tracking, AI Engineering Manager positions make up 0% of the market. At Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HPE, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.

AI hiring keeps growing across industries. Companies in tech, finance, healthcare, and retail are all building AI teams. The strongest demand is for people who can bridge the gap between AI research and production engineering. The shift toward generative AI has created new role types (LLM Engineer, Prompt Engineer, AI Agent Developer) that didn't exist three years ago, while traditional roles (Data Scientist, ML Engineer) have evolved to incorporate LLM capabilities.

What the Work Looks Like

Day-to-day work involves a mix of building, debugging, and collaborating. You'll write code, review pull requests, participate in design discussions, and work with cross-functional teams (product, design, data) to define what AI features should do and how they should behave. Expect to spend time on both technical implementation and communication. Most AI teams operate in two-week sprint cycles, with regular demos and retrospectives. The ratio of heads-down coding to meetings and reviews varies by seniority, with senior roles spending more time on architecture decisions and mentorship.

AI hiring keeps growing across industries. Companies in tech, finance, healthcare, and retail are all building AI teams. The strongest demand is for people who can bridge the gap between AI research and production engineering. The shift toward generative AI has created new role types (LLM Engineer, Prompt Engineer, AI Agent Developer) that didn't exist three years ago, while traditional roles (Data Scientist, ML Engineer) have evolved to incorporate LLM capabilities.

Skills Required

Claude (14% of roles) Prompt Engineering (16% of roles)

Python and cloud platform experience are common requirements. Specific skill needs vary by company and focus area, but familiarity with ML frameworks, data pipelines, and API design covers the basics for most roles. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), vector databases, and LLM API integration are increasingly standard requirements across role types.

Beyond the core stack, communication skills matter more than many technical candidates realize. The ability to explain AI capabilities and limitations to non-technical stakeholders is a differentiator at every level. Technical writing, documentation, and clear thinking about tradeoffs are underrated skills in AI roles. Experience with evaluation methodology (how to measure whether an AI system is working well) is becoming a core requirement, especially for roles that involve LLM integration.

Look for job postings that specify the problems you'll work on, the tech stack, and the team structure. Vague postings that list every AI buzzword are often a sign the company hasn't figured out what they need. Strong postings describe the product context, the team you'd join, and the specific challenges you'd tackle.

Compensation Benchmarks

AI Engineering Manager roles pay a median of $275,000 based on 41 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $227,400. This role's midpoint ($232K) sits 16% below the category median. Disclosed range: $153K to $310K.

Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($274,200) and Research Engineer ($260,000). By seniority level: Entry: $97,880; Mid: $165,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $247,800; VP: $250,000.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HPE AI Hiring

Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HPE has 4 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI Engineering Manager, AI/ML Engineer, AI Product Manager. Positions span Cupertino, CA, US, San Jose, CA, US, Spring, TX, US. Compensation range: $185K - $412K.

Location Context

Across all AI roles, 15% (590 positions) offer remote work, while 3,217 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,643 roles, $211,000 median); San Francisco (2,168 roles, $253,000 median); Los Angeles (1,792 roles, $191,580 median).

Career Path

Common paths into AI Engineering Manager roles include Software Engineer, Data Scientist, Data Analyst.

From here, career progression typically leads toward Senior Engineer, AI Architect, Engineering Manager, Principal Engineer.

Focus on building things that work. A deployed project that solves a real problem is worth more than any certification. Contribute to open-source, build portfolio projects, and invest in fundamentals (software engineering, statistics, systems design) rather than chasing the latest framework. The AI field moves fast, but the engineers who succeed long-term are the ones with strong fundamentals who can adapt to new tools and paradigms as they emerge.

What to Expect in Interviews

AI interviews typically combine coding challenges (Python-focused), system design questions tailored to the role, and discussions about your experience with relevant tools and frameworks. Strong candidates demonstrate both technical depth and the ability to make pragmatic engineering tradeoffs. Prepare portfolio projects that demonstrate end-to-end capability rather than isolated skills.

When evaluating opportunities: Look for job postings that specify the problems you'll work on, the tech stack, and the team structure. Vague postings that list every AI buzzword are often a sign the company hasn't figured out what they need. Strong postings describe the product context, the team you'd join, and the specific challenges you'd tackle.

AI Hiring Overview

The AI job market has 3,823 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 112 entry-level, 1,798 mid-level, 1,516 senior, and 397 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (590 positions). The remaining 3,217 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.

The market median for AI roles is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($275,000 median, 41 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 55 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 434 roles).

AI hiring keeps growing across industries. Companies in tech, finance, healthcare, and retail are all building AI teams. The strongest demand is for people who can bridge the gap between AI research and production engineering. The shift toward generative AI has created new role types (LLM Engineer, Prompt Engineer, AI Agent Developer) that didn't exist three years ago, while traditional roles (Data Scientist, ML Engineer) have evolved to incorporate LLM capabilities.

The AI Job Market Today

The AI job market spans 3,823 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,629), Data Scientist (322), AI Software Engineer (279). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.

The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (112) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,798) and senior (1,516) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 397 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.

Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (590 positions), with 3,217 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.

AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $200,100. Top-quartile roles start at $253,500, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.

Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $275,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.

The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,979 postings), Aws (1,190 postings), Azure (899 postings), Rag (839 postings), Gcp (726 postings), Pytorch (595 postings), Prompt Engineering (595 postings), Claude (540 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.

Frequently Asked Questions

Based on 41 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI Engineering Manager positions is $275,000. Actual compensation varies by seniority, location, and company stage.
Python and cloud platform experience are common requirements. Specific skill needs vary by company and focus area, but familiarity with ML frameworks, data pipelines, and API design covers the basics for most roles. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), vector databases, and LLM API integration are increasingly standard requirements across role types.
About 15% of the 3,823 AI roles we track offer remote work. Remote availability varies by company and seniority level, with senior and leadership roles more likely to offer location flexibility.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HPE is among the companies actively hiring for AI and ML talent. Check our company profiles for detailed breakdowns of open roles, salary ranges, and hiring trends.
Common next steps from AI Engineering Manager positions include Senior Engineer, AI Architect, Engineering Manager, Principal Engineer. Progression depends on whether you lean toward technical depth, people management, or product strategy.

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