Engineering Program Manager

Thanks for your interest in Oklo! We are searching for an Engineering Program Manager (EPM) to join our fuel recycling engineering team within Oklo’s Recycling Division.

Position Description

The Engineering Program Manager will play a key role in delivering our fuel recycling facility by turning complex engineering objectives into coordinated, evidence-based programs that mature with clarity, urgency, and discipline.

The Engineering Program Manager will be closely tied with functional engineering groups within the Recycling Division. You will partner closely with the group's Team Lead, who owns technical direction and people leadership, while you establish the program structure and operating cadence that enables the team to deliver.

This role is for a technically fluent program leader who can bring focus and transparency to complex situations, influence without relying on direct authority, and adapt the program when empirical data challenges the design or analysis. Success requires both rigorous execution and creative, out-of-the-box thinking in a fast-moving, safety-conscious environment.

Specific responsibilities may include:

Define program scope, deliverables, success criteria, decision points, and technical milestones aligned with Recycling Division objectives and the integrated facility schedule.

Translate established functional requirements into executable engineering and analysis plans.

Drive the team to define and mature deliverables, acceptance criteria, and verification methods.

Build and maintain integrated work plans across program functions, which may include analysis, design, modeling, prototyping, and testing.

Maintain dependencies, critical paths, resource needs, long-lead activities, and required decision dates.

Lead the day-to-day cadence, including planning sessions, technical coordination meetings, design and milestone reviews, action tracking, and timely closure of decisions and blockers.

Coordinate interfaces with other Recycling teams and their EPMs, as well as regulatory, safety, deployment, and procurement partners.

Maintain a current view of technical risks, program risks, assumptions, interfaces, decisions, and open items.

Prepare and facilitate effective program reviews with clear entry and exit criteria, decision asks, evidence summaries, risks, tradeoffs, and follow-up actions.

Communicate program status at the right level for engineers, functional leaders, and executives.

Continuously improve how the team plans, learns, and executes.

Minimum Qualifications:

3+ years in Engineering Program Management or similar (engineering or technical project management, technical product management, systems engineering, or related technical leadership roles)

Experience leading complex, cross-functional engineering work in industrial, infrastructure, or other technically rigorous environments.

Experience delivering engineered hardware in areas such as design, analysis, safety, prototyping, operations, maintenance, and testing.

Bachelor's degree in engineering, physical science, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Demonstrated success guiding an engineered product through successive iterations of maturity.

Proficiency with a variety of project management tools, with experience selecting and changing tools in tandem with changes in scope and scale.

Comfort operating in a matrixed environment with multiple stakeholders and competing priorities.

Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to present technical status, risks, tradeoffs, and decisions to different levels of leadership within the organization.

Bonus Qualifications:

Exposure to nuclear, chemical, mechanical, process, systems, industrial, or facility engineering environments.

Exposure to highly regulated design environments, including managing licensing deliverables, safety analyses, configuration and change management, requirements traceability, and verification or validation planning.

Exposure to risk and reliability methods such as FMEA, hazard analysis, test planning, design reviews, and technical readiness or maturity assessments.

Exposure to creating and managing process and facility engineering artifacts, such as block/process flow diagrams, P&IDs, equipment specifications, technical drawings, and engineering analyses.

Exposure to managing multiple vendor engagements, from RFP to SOW stages, through regular touchpoints through completion of all stated deliverables.

Competencies

We are looking for an Engineering Program Manager who is:

An excellent communicator: Clear, concise, and credible; able to synthesize complex technical work into articulate decisions, risks, and actions.

Technically fluent and curious: Comfortable engaging deeply with engineering details to understand requirements, interfaces, assumptions, risk, and blockers.

Execution-oriented: Skilled at translating broad objectives into sequenced work, accountable owners, measurable milestones, and sustained follow-through.

Results-driven: Focused on connecting analyses and assumptions to delivered systems and equipment. Identifies high-value solutions to effectively move the needle on the overall goal.

A systems thinker: Able to see how decisions within one functional organization affect interfaces.

Collaborative and influential: Builds trust across disciplines and drives alignment and closure without depending on formal authority.

Creative and adaptable: Brings unconventional ideas to hard problems, remains effective amid ambiguity, and can re-plan quickly when technical learning changes the path.

Strategic and detail-oriented: Maintains the goal while staying close enough to the work to identify gaps early.

Mission- and safety-driven: Motivated to deliver first-of-a-kind nuclear technology on aggressive timelines without compromising technical rigor or safety.

Who you are:

A startup person : You aren't driven by titles or hierarchy, and prefer efficiency to excess process. You don't need or expect to have a lot of guidance but you enjoy working in a fast-paced team. If you prefer the culture and feel of a large organization, that is great, but you likely won’t enjoy working with us! There is plenty of important work and plenty of good opportunities with organizations like that.

Motivated : You are self-motivated. You bring an enthusiasm to the team, and imbue a sense of passion that goes beyond clocking in and clocking out. This isn’t about a fake or arbitrary “pieces of flair” mentality or lack of work-life balance! It is about being a part of the vision and feeling a part of reaching team goals.

A team-player : Oklo genuinely is a team. We aren’t about taking credit for ourselves, and we aren’t about pushing blame to others. We do incredible things because we work as a team.

An excellent communicator : We need a person who is not only technically competent but also a clear and upbeat communicator.

Creative : Being creative means that when things fall outside clear scopes or processes or problems arise without clear solutions, you are able to identify it as well as invent ways to solve a problem or fill a need without micromanagement. The successful person in this job will not only be creative, but also enjoy being creative and solving open-ended problems which may change day-by-day.

Detail-oriented : This focus is a big part of excellence, consistency, and quality. Excellent grammar and spelling matter for both good communication as well as the image of the company that we put forward.

About Oklo travel requirements:

Oklo requires remote employees to travel to headquarters (Santa Clara, CA) twice a quarter annually, based on business or team needs, including attendance at team meetings, off-sites, and other company events or gatherings. For the first two weeks of onboarding, employees are required to be in person at headquarters