Technical Program Manager, Datacenter Optimization

OVERVIEW Physical Superintelligence is an exceptionally well-funded seed-stage startup with roots at Google, Meta, DeepMind, NVIDIA, Citadel, Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins, the Perimeter Institute, and the Institute for Advanced Study building AI systems to discover new physics at scale. We are seeking a Technical Project Manager to own the end-to-end delivery of our datacenter optimization engagements — from first technical scoping call through deployed, verified results in a live facility. Our mission is to discover and commercialize transformative physics breakthroughs at scale with artificial superintelligence, safely, verifiably, and for broad public benefit. The last century's golden age of physics gave us transistors, lasers, and nuclear energy. We believe artificial superintelligence will unlock the next one. We're creating the infrastructure to industrialize scientific discovery and usher in this new era. Datacenters are where that discovery meets the physical world first. Thermal transport, fluid dynamics, power delivery, and materials behavior all compound into the efficiency of a facility, and all of them are places where better physics translates directly into megawatts, dollars, and carbon. This role is how that work reaches customers. ROLE You own the customer and you own the project. Our optimization engagements sit at the intersection of a research team producing novel physical models and an operator running critical infrastructure with real uptime obligations. You are the person accountable for translating between them and for the outcome on both sides. This role is deliberately scoped for someone who wants more surface area than a typical TPM job offers, and it concentrates on four areas. RESPONSIBILITIES Own engagements end to end. Run datacenter optimization projects from technical discovery through deployment and verified results. Define scope, success criteria, and measurement methodology with the customer up front. Build and hold the plan, the critical path, the risk register, and the change control. When a project is at risk, you know before the customer does, and you have a plan when you tell them. Own the customer relationship. Be the primary technical point of contact for facility engineers, infrastructure leads, and their executives. Run the working cadence, the steering reviews, and the hard conversations about scope, timeline, and results. Earn enough credibility that customers bring you problems early instead of escalating late. You will spend real time on-site in mechanical rooms and on whitespace floors, not only in conference rooms. Bridge research and deployment. Take physics and modeling output from our research team and drive it into something that can be validated against a real facility, instrumented, and operated safely. Own the interface: the data we need from the customer, the constraints they cannot violate, the instrumentation and telemetry plan, the baselining approach, and the verification standard we hold ourselves to. Push back on both sides when the science and the operating reality are not yet reconciled. Run delivery AI-first. This is non-negotiable: you are, or are willing to become, completely AI-native, fluent across the current frontier models and the best existing agent and automation tooling, and you keep pace as they change. Project management, status synthesis, data reconciliation, reporting, and customer artifacts should be substantially agent-driven. You are expected to build the delivery machinery that lets one TPM carry a portfolio that would normally take a team, and to turn each engagement into reusable process rather than bespoke heroics. Across these areas you also shape what our commercial delivery function becomes. You are early enough that the playbook does not exist yet. What you build — the scoping framework, the measurement standard, the delivery model — becomes how PSI ships to infrastructure customers. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR A proven owner of complex technical projects. Five or more years running technical programs where you were genuinely accountable for the outcome, not just the tracker. You have delivered projects with hardware, facilities, or physical-world dependencies, where a slip has consequences you cannot recover with a hotfix. Datacenter or critical infrastructure fluency. You understand how a datacenter actually works: power chain, cooling topology, airflow and thermal management, PUE and its limits as a metric, BMS and DCIM systems, capacity and commissioning. You can hold a technical conversation with a facility engineer and be taken seriously. Direct experience in colocation, hyperscale, HPC, or mission-critical facilities is strongly preferred. Customer ownership at the technical level. You have been the face of a technical delivery to a demanding customer and kept the relationship strong through bad news. You can negotiate scope, set expectations that hold, and represent your team's work credibly to an executive buye…