Program Manager

Role Overview

We are seeking a senior technical leader to help advance NI’s Software Community Program by strengthening our engagement with customers, developers, technical communities, and other influential members of the NI ecosystem.

This individual will serve as a visible and credible technical representative of NI software-helping customers understand our software strategy and direction, building stronger relationships across the engineering community, and creating engagement that increases advocacy, participation, and confidence in the NI software platform.

The role combines deep technical expertise, community engagement, technical communication, and relationship development. It is not a product management role, although the insights gained through close engagement with customers and the community will help inform NI’s strategy and priorities.

Goals

• Strengthen NI’s relationships with customers, developers, lead users, Champions, partners, and other influential members of the engineering community.
• Increase understanding of and confidence in NI’s software strategy, technical direction, and long-term vision.
• Grow a network of technically credible advocates who actively participate in and contribute to the NI ecosystem.
• Increase NI’s visibility and technical credibility within the communities where engineers learn, collaborate, and influence one another.
• Help customers understand how NI software is evolving to support modern engineering workflows and technologies.
• Create stronger connections between NI’s internal software organizations and the external communities that use, extend, and advocate for our products.
• Surface important technical trends, customer concerns, community sentiment, and emerging engineering practices that should influence NI’s priorities.
• Expand the impact of the Software Community Program through scalable technical content, demonstrations, community programs, and strategic relationships.

What You’ll Do

• Serve as a highly credible technical representative of NI within customer and developer communities.
• Engage directly with customers through technical meetings, site visits, workshops, user groups, conferences, industry events, and other forums.
• Communicate NI’s software strategy, technical direction, roadmap, and key messages to highly technical audiences.
• Explain and demonstrate how NI software supports modern engineering practices, including AI-assisted development, CI/CD, automation, containers, open source, and emerging software workflows.
• Develop and deliver technical presentations, demonstrations, prototypes, examples, and other content that make NI’s software strategy tangible.
• Participate directly in online and in-person engineering communities, answering questions, contributing technical perspective, and representing NI appropriately.
• Build relationships with influential users who can become advocates, contributors, early adopters, partners, and strategic collaborators.
• Support programs involving Champions, user groups, developer engagement, open source, technical content, customer advocacy, and other community initiatives.
• Identify opportunities for deeper collaboration with customers and community members, including early-access programs, open-source initiatives, technical partnerships, and co-innovation.
• Work with R&D, Product, Marketing, Sales, and other internal teams to ensure community engagement is aligned with NI’s broader software strategy.
• Equip other customer-facing teams with technical messaging, demonstrations, examples, and expertise that help them represent NI’s software strategy effectively.
• Bring meaningful community perspectives, technical trends, customer concerns, and emerging practices back into NI.

Success Criteria

Success in this role will be demonstrated by:

• Strong, trusted relationships with strategically important customers, technical leaders, community members, and advocates.
• Increased customer and community understanding of NI’s software strategy and technical direction.
• Growth in the number and quality of technically influential users actively engaging with and advocating for NI.
• Effective representation of NI at customer engagements, conferences, user groups, online communities, and other technical forums.
• High-quality technical content, demonstrations, and presentations that are reused across community and customer engagements.
• Increased participation in Community Program initiatives and stronger connections between previously disconnected parts of the NI ecosystem.
• Clear evidence that community engagement is influencing customer perception, advocacy, adoption, and participation.
• Actionable insights from the community being surfaced consistently to internal stakeholders.
• Recognition internally and externally as a trusted technical voice for NI software.
• The ability to independently identify high-value opportunities for community engagement and turn them into meaningful outcomes.

Who You Are

• You are first and foremost a technologist and engineer.
• You enjoy engaging directly with other engineers and can quickly establish technical credibility with experienced developers, architects, and technical leaders.
• You can move comfortably between writing code, discussing software architecture, presenting to a room of customers, and having a strategic conversation with senior leadership.
• You are an effective storyteller who can explain complex technology and strategy without oversimplifying it.
• You are comfortable representing a company publicly and responding thoughtfully to difficult questions, skepticism, or strong customer opinions.
• You naturally build relationships and enjoy connecting people who share technical interests or could benefit from working together.
• You are curious about how software engineering is changing and actively experiment with new technologies and development practices.
• You are comfortable operating with significant autonomy and creating structure where it does not already exist.
• You care about building communities, not simply broadcasting messages to them.
• You understand that credibility with technical communities comes from authentic participation, technical competence, and sustained engagement.

Background and Skills

• Significant professional software engineering experience, ideally including experience designing, developing, or architecting complex software systems.
• Deep understanding of modern software engineering practices, development workflows, and software architecture.
• Strong familiarity with technologies and practices such as AI-assisted software development, CI/CD, DevOps, automation, containers, APIs, and open-source software.
• Ability to rapidly develop deep technical knowledge of NI software, its architecture, and the engineering workflows it supports.
• Exceptional written, verbal, and presentation skills.
• Experience presenting complex technical topics to engineering audiences.
• Ability to create technical demonstrations, prototypes, examples, or other hands-on assets.
• Experience working directly with customers, developer communities, partners, or other external technical audiences.
• Ability to communicate effectively with both highly technical contributors and senior business or engineering leaders.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills and the ability to influence without direct authority.
• Experience participating in or contributing to developer communities, open-source projects, technical conferences, user groups, or similar communities is highly desirable.
• Familiarity with NI software, automated test, measurement, engineering systems, or adjacent technical domains is highly desirable.
• Willingness to travel regularly for customer engagements, community activities, and industry events.