What are the responsibilities and job description for the Program Manager, Emerging Technologies position at Samsung Research America?
Lab Summary:
The Emerging Technologies Group is uniquely positioned to be at the heart of Samsung Research America’s innovation engine aimed towards advancing Samsung’s product offerings across smartphones, wearables, TVs, XR devices, and identifying the next big growth drivers for Samsung. The group’s mission is to discover and incubate high-potential innovative technologies across the spectrum of fundamental and applied research that lay the foundation for future Samsung products and services. To achieve this mission, the group collaborates closely with both with external entities such as universities, startups, VCs, and government labs, and with several Samsung Product and Advanced Research labs.
Position Summary:
As the Program Manager for the Emerging Technologies Group, you are passionate about evangelizing and realizing a technology vision for products that are beyond the horizon. You have a keen eye for technologies at the cusp of a breakthrough and will work in close partnership with university professors and researchers, startup co-founders, and SRA researchers, engineers, and other cross-functional teams to mature these technologies in alignment with Samsung’s strategic direction. You are a highly motivated self-starter who will define problem statements, create roadmaps, catalyze building irrefutable evidence for technology viability, scope programs to meet research objectives and business priorities, define milestones and success metrics, and drive projects with aggressive schedules to completion by aligning and leading large cross-functional teams. You excel at influencing without authority and successfully navigate ambiguity by taking a structured and principled approach. You demonstrate strategic thinking, strong technical problem-solving and analytical skills, excellent communication skills, and an ability to influence business and technical leaders to believe in your technology vision.
Position Responsibilities:
- Scope Academic-industry programs to meet research objectives and business priorities, define milestones, schedules, and success metrics.
- Collaborate with internal and external cross functional teams to drive program deliverables across technical analysis, early-stage technology research and PoC development.
- Operate autonomously across several teams to manage multiple concurrent projects within budget.
- Develop and own communication plans to effectively and proactively communicate program status, issues, and risks to stakeholders.
- Manage technical risks by brainstorming with technical subject matter experts on alternative research directions. Mitigate scheduling risks by building contingency plans.
- Define and track key metrics and key quality and performance indicators and drive cross functional execution of program deliverables across multiple projects.
- Drive internal and external process improvements including reducing the manual efforts through automation.
Required Skills:
- Master’s degree in technology or engineering discipline (e.g. EE, CS, or similar), or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience.
- 5 years of proven experience managing complex concurrent consumer hardware or software technology projects by operating autonomously across multiple teams.
- Knowledge of early-stage technology research programs: understanding user needs, gathering requirements, defining project scope, building schedules and executing programs from inception to prototyping, defining associated deliverables.
- Exposure to multiple emerging technologies such as applied AI, extended reality (XR), robotics, etc.
- Demonstrated ability to work in a fast-paced, ambiguous cross-functional environment and communicate effectively across organizational structures and multiple management levels.
- Must be willing to travel domestically and internationally (up to 20%).
Special Attributes:
- Positive attitude and energy, imagination, resilience, flexibility and resourcefulness.
- Clear communication skills with the ability to adapt to the audience and situation.
- Strong analytical skills to build deliberate, objective recommendations and respond to challenges and objections.
- Structured thinking to navigate ambiguous technological, organizational and scheduling situations.
- Resilience to overcome hurdles and address failures with alternative paths.
- Ability to rally the organization to believe in the technology vision and execute on tight deadlines.
