Technical Program Manager, Inception (12 Month Fixed Term Contract)

About us

Artificial Intelligence could be one of humanity’s most useful inventions. At Google DeepMind, we’re a team of scientists, engineers, machine learning experts and more, working together to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, and collaborate with others on critical challenges, ensuring safety and ethics are the highest priority.

Snapshot

The role of the Program Management Team is to organise and enable our teams to be the best at what they do and to make fast-paced progress towards our goal. We continually pursue sustainable ways to optimise our work, striving to ensure we cultivate an environment where people can be both highly collaborative and deeply creative, making responsible and groundbreaking research progress at pace. We build positive relationships with teams, bringing clarity to ambiguity and providing stability during change. We provide expertise in various program management techniques to structure abstract and complex research, engineering and operational projects across the business. We use our coaching skills to support and enable people and teams to do their best work together. We continually deepen our domain knowledge, working alongside researchers and engineers to ensure all our work is advancing towards our mission!

The Role

This is a FTC (Maternity Cover) role for the new Inception Group at Google DeepMind. Inception will run like a startup, balancing high energy idea generation with pragmatic, clear and regularly refined operations. This collaborative, multidisciplinary group is situated primarily in London and Mountain View with collaborators across the globe. It will have a sizable and diverse portfolio of early stage, design focused projects, building on working processes developed internally on projects such as Astra, Genie, and Simpla. 

This role will have both Horizontal and Vertical aspects. As well as supporting Inception wide activities the role will partner closely with the leadership of one or more London based teams to help refine strategy as part of the Inception group and ensure successful delivery of it. 

The initial focus will likely be on the current Worlds team - this is a mixed discipline group of software and UX engineers, designers and artists, often working in collaboration with research groups from across GDM to accelerate and shape our progress towards AGI through the production of game worlds and related technology.

Key responsibilities:

• Partner with Worlds leadership to help iterate and deliver the vision and strategy for the team
• Support the team through change, building on existing resilient and flexible mindsets to enable a culture of constant improvement and exploration.
• Work with technical-creative teams on end-to-end project planning and delivery, using your knowledge of project methodologies including tools and techniques such as stand ups, retrospectives, agile boards, project plans, etc.
• Support sub-teams to develop clear delivery plans with well understood technical requirements. 
• Providing best practices and lightweight processes to team members to enable self organization.
• Facilitate conversations, meetings and opportunities for collaboration, within team, within Inception and across GDM. Driving the best outcomes and creating connections and relationships.
• Track progress, maintain up to date information and relevant technical documentation, anticipate and propose solutions to issues and risks.
• Identify opportunities to improve ways of working, tools or processes.
• Demonstrate a curious mindset and a commitment to learning and understanding the various fields across Inception, and your broader understanding of AGI.
• Iterate and define metrics and achievements to accelerate innovation, evaluate the success of programs against their aims, goals and objectives, and share lessons and insights across the wider Inception org. 
• Conduct regular retrospectives on successes and failures and provide independent analysis.

About You

In order to set you up for success as a (Technical) Program Management at Google DeepMind,  we look for the following skills and experience:

• Technical degree or advanced working knowledge. Industry experience should include partnering with technical leads to develop strategy and experience launching complex products.
• Excellent technical understanding and communication ability, with the ability to distil sophisticated technical ideas to their essence
• Knowledge and expertise in project/program management with the skill to navigate through ambiguity and adjust and adapt plans and strategies as project conditions change    
• Experience supporting teams of different sizes to deliver projects at various lifecycle stages independently and through others
• Experience in solving complex challenges, implementing scalable and sustainable solutions  
• Ability to develop meaningful relationships with key stakeholders and leverage these to influence action and outcomes
• Experience supporting teams in fast-paced and constantly changing environments, acting as a sounding board as individuals go through the change cycle and supporting during challenging times 
• You are demonstrably passionate about advancing AI and delivering new concepts for how the world can make use of and experience it.

In addition, the following would be an advantage: 

• Games or Creative industry experience.
• Demonstrated understanding of how to successfully partner with and support talented people from a wide variety of backgrounds, including non-traditional ones.

At Google DeepMind, we value diversity of experience, knowledge, backgrounds and perspectives and harness these qualities to create extraordinary impact. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law. If you have a disability or additional need that requires accommodation, please do not hesitate to let us know.

Application deadline: July 14th 2025