Technical Program Manager, Research and Innovation Engineering, and Privacy PMO

Location: Lisbon, Portugal About the Role Cloudflare is seeking a highly skilled and self-motivated Technical Program Manager to lead and manage various company-wide initiatives and projects spanning multiple quarters and teams within our Emerging Technology and Incubation team. Your main responsibility will be to work cross functionally across product, engineering, design, marketing, security, billing, technical operations, infrastructure, legal, and more to build and execute on the overall strategy.
You will play an active part in collecting requirements, setting up deliverables, reporting progress, managing stakeholder expectations, and working with various functions to deliver success.
The ideal candidate is process driven but remains flexible and iterative, someone who loves to tackle new challenges, really enjoys bringing people together as a team, and driving them towards success. This job involves managing multiple stakeholders and accommodating teams dispersed across multiple time zones.
This position is based in Lisbon, Portugal. You will be reporting into the Engineering Program Management Organization (PMO).
Key Responsibilities
As a Level 3 Technical Program Manager (TPM), you will be the central driving force responsible for the overall planning, portfolio management, and execution cadence across our foundational Research, Innovation Engineering, and Privacy organizations. You will focus on improving the internal-facing impact of these teams, ensuring their cutting-edge work is effectively integrated, prioritized, and delivered across Cloudflare and the wider Internet. This role requires a strong blend of technical acumen, strategic thinking, and organizational leadership.
1. Overall Program and Portfolio Management

• Strategic Planning: Own the overall program planning and cross-portfolio management for the Research team, Innovation Engineering team, and Privacy team.
• Inter-Departmental Alignment: Define, track, and manage complex dependencies between these organizations and broader Product Engineering, Product Management, Sales, and Legal teams (e.g., aligning Privacy initiatives with the SSL team's roadmap).
• Priority & Impact Modeling: Implement a formal intake process for Research and Innovation projects, including clear criteria for prioritization, resource allocation, and measurable impact assessment.
• Executive Reporting: Provide clear, concise, and frequent updates on portfolio status, risks, and impact to Engineering Leadership.

2. Research Engineering Focus

• Internal Integration: Drive the strategy to integrate the Research team's academic focus back into Cloudflare's core engineering efforts, ensuring greater internal adoption and impact.
• Project Execution: Program manage large-scale foundational projects, including:
• Merkle Tree Certificates and other critical cryptographic advancements.
• Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) initiatives, coordinating development, rollout, and Sales enablement across multiple engineering teams.
• Single IP/Standards body work.
• Escalation Management: Handle high-priority, complex escalations from core engineering such as performance or quality issues, ensuring swift and effective resolution by the appropriate Research personnel.

3. Innovation Engineering Focus

• Intake & Transition Management: Establish a clear process for tracking the intake and prioritization of the Innovation team's "Tiger Team" projects.
• Handover & Ownership: Facilitate the successful transition and handover of completed innovation projects to owning Product Engineering teams, and track post-handover success.
• Strategic Project Oversight: Manage core strategic innovation projects.
• Community Facilitation and Internet standards: Manage the ongoing operational cadence for community-driven projects and Internet Standards.

4. Privacy Engineering Focus

• Scope Expansion: Partner with leadership to manage the growth and expanding scope of the Privacy Engineering team into areas of Privacy Transparency.
• Cross-Team Brokering: Act as the primary interface and broker for the Privacy team, ensuring compliance and transparency requirements are integrated early into technical roadmaps.

Desirable skills and knowledge

• BS+ in Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Security or related field or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years experience in technical program management and a desire for continuous improvement.
• Ability to create realistic project plans, managing dependencies, and overseeing execution to meet commitments and deliver with predictability.
• Excellent oral and written communication. Ability to read the room.
• Experience working with multiple time zones and multiple cross functional teams.
• Strong competency with Confluence, JIRA
• Experience with various development methodologies (Agile, Waterfall, Kaizen, Scrum, etc).
• A mind open to feedback and filled with curiosity, who has successfully gained experience with peers by demonstrating empathy.
• A self-started who is willing to identify and action on what is best for the team.
• Comfortable managing tight deadlines, changing priorities, and ambiguity.