Technical Program Manager

Job offer

The OpenEuroLLM project is a landmark pan-European initiative funded under the EU’s Digital Europe Programme with a €37.4M investment, uniting 20 leading research institutions, companies, and EuroHPC supercomputing centres to build the first comprehensive, open-source family of large language models that cover all official EU languages and reflect European values of transparency, openness and regulatory compliance.

We are seeking an experienced Technical Program Manager to coordinate and drive impact across diverse work packages in this flagship project. In this role you will shape the strategic execution of cutting-edge AI research and development that democratises access to advanced multilingual AI, strengthens European digital sovereignty, and accelerates innovation for SMEs, public sector organisations, and the broader tech ecosystem.

Main Responsibilities

• Lead and coordinate technical OpenEuroLLM work packages, ensuring dependencies are managed, deliverables are timely and high-quality, and partners stay aligned.
• Maintain an integrated view of project schedules, internal deliverables, inter-work package dependencies, and critical paths
• Track commitments, milestones, and delivery risks across key work packages
• Actively support selected high-impact work packages with ongoing execution tracking (similar to feature ownership in large software projects)
• Reduce coordination and planning load on senior technical contributors
• Facilitate effective cross-partner collaboration and direct communication.
• Deliver clear project status updates and ensure timely escalation of risks.
• Work closely with the Project Manager to align the formal project obligations as described in the project Description of Action with the technical work and suggest changes if needed.

Collaboration and Reporting

• This role reports to Jan Hajič, closely cooperates with the Project Manager, Tea Vojtěchová, and is employed by Charles University
• The role will be based in Prague or possibly at one of the consortium partner sites
• The closest technical collaboration partners will be the leads of the technical development effort of the project, the leads of the LLM building, Training Data, and Evaluation work packages.

Priorities for first 6 months

• Establish strong working relationships with key technical stakeholders and project partners
• Map all work package dependencies and identify key execution risks.
• Implement a robust coordination framework for milestone delivery.
• Establish reporting practices for both regular status updates and steering committee work.

Ideal Candidate Profile

• Proven experience in managing complex projects
• Strong skills in cross-organizational collaboration and stakeholder engagement
• Technical fluency to understand project dependencies, assess feasibility, and communicate effectively with research engineers across domains
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English
• Bonus: Experience with EU or other publicly funded research projects
• Bonus: Experience working on AI model development projects.

What we offer

• Visible position in a closely watched large, strategic European project in the AI and LLM area
• If moved to Prague, workspace in the historical center of Prague, within an inspiring language technology and AI group of 100+ researchers at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, School of Computer Science, Charles University.
• Competitive salary based on previous experience (negotiable)
• University employment benefits (contribution to pension fund(s), special mobile tariffs including for family, lunch subsidies etc.)
• The contract is for two years, ending at the end of February 2028 unless the project is extended.
• salary according to relevant experience (90,000-190,000 CZK or, in exceptional circumstances, special contractual salary)