---
title: 'Technical Program Manager at Nace AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-nace-ai-palo-alto-8py4nbage3rw'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Technical Program Manager at Nace AI

- **Company:** Nace AI
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-16
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/nace.ai/86873a46-b684-4cdf-8cd9-d0170249c649

## Job description

Technical Program Manager Palo Alto, CA | Full-Time | On-site About Nace AI: Nace AI is an enterprise AI product and research company in Palo Alto (backed by General Catalyst, Walden Catalyst, and Intel). We build long-running AI agents powered by our own SLMs and metamodels — we started with financial audit and accounting workflows and are expanding from there. Real enterprise deployments, not demos. Role Overview: As our first Technical Program Manager, you will be the operating system behind our product execution. [Nace.AI](http://Nace.AI) moves fast — research, engineering, product, and domain experts (auditors, tax and compliance specialists) all ship in parallel, and you will be the person who keeps every workstream visible, sequenced, and on schedule. You will oversee all product activity from roadmap to release: translating priorities into concrete plans, tracking deliverables and deadlines across teams, surfacing risks before they become slips, and making sure the right people have the right information at the right time. This role demands exceptional communication and organizational skills, technical fluency to engage credibly with engineers, and the judgment to know when to drive, when to escalate, and when to get out of the way. Key Responsibilities:

- Own program management for all product development activity — plan, track, and drive deliverables, milestones, and deadlines across engineering, research, product, and domain-expert teams.
- Run the operating cadence: sprint planning, standups, launch reviews, and leadership status updates that keep execution visible and accountable.
- Build and maintain roadmaps, timelines, and cross-team dependency maps; identify critical paths and sequence work accordingly.
- Proactively identify risks, blockers, and resourcing gaps — escalate early, propose mitigations, and drive them to resolution.
- Coordinate product launches end-to-end, including release readiness, cross-functional checklists, and post-launch follow-through.
- Serve as the communication hub between technical and non-technical stakeholders — translate engineering progress into clear, decision-ready updates for leadership.
- Establish lightweight, scalable program management processes and tooling standards as the company grows — enough structure to move fast, never so much that it slows us down.

Qualifications:

- 4+ years of experience as a Technical Program Manager, Program Manager, or similar role driving complex, cross-functional technical programs.
- Outstanding written and verbal communication skills — you make complex technical progress legible to any audience, and your updates are the ones people actually read.
- Exceptional organizational and scheduling ability: you can hold many parallel workstreams in your head and never let a deadline surprise anyone.
- Sufficient technical fluency to engage credibly with engineers on scope, dependencies, and tradeoffs (experience with AI/ML products a strong plus).
- Proven track record of shipping: programs you ran landed on time, and stakeholders trusted your reporting.
- Fluency with modern program management and collaboration tooling (Linear, Jira, Notion, or similar).
- Bias for action and comfort with ambiguity — you create structure where none exists.
- BS degree in a technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience at an early-stage or high-growth startup where you built program management practices from scratch.
- Experience managing programs involving ML/LLM product development — model releases, evaluation cycles, or data pipelines.
- Familiarity with enterprise software delivery in regulated domains (finance, audit, compliance, healthcare).
- Experience coordinating launches involving both software engineering and subject-matter-expert workflows.

Why Nace AI?

- Pedigree: Work with a team from top-tier institutions and companies, backed by the best VCs in the world.
- Impact: As our first TPM, you will define how a company aiming to be the "OS" for professional knowledge executes — your systems become the company's systems.
- Competitive Package: Silicon Valley-standard salary, significant equity, and premium benefits.

## About Nace AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Nace AI builds long-horizon reasoning models and AI agents that audit, reconcile, and report on financial and compliance data for enterprises.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed / Series A – $21.5M raised in 2026)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Zhanibek Datbayev (CTO/Co-Founder), Ritesh Shrivastava (Co-Founder), Sudha Valluru (COO/Co-Founder), Swathi B (Co-Founder), and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Audit, Compliance, Finance, Accounting, Enterprise AI
- **Target customers**: B2B enterprise – specifically audit firms, finance departments, compliance teams, and professional services firms
- **Mission**: Build long-horizon AI that runs organizations; give professionals their time back by automating high-stakes knowledge work

## Products & Services
- **Metamodel**: A specialized small language model (SLM) platform that enterprises can customize with their own policies and knowledge. Used for audit, contract governance, and financial reporting.
- **Agentic Accounting**: AI agent that executes end-to-end financial audits, billing audits, and revenue leakage detection by connecting directly to databases.
- **Nace Verification Intelligence**: Evidence-based reasoning engine that processes up to 1 million files (PDFs, spreadsheets, databases) to automate SOX 404 reports, contract compliance checks, and due diligence.
- **Nace Process Automation**: Automatically maps transaction flows across 10+ disparate databases to visualize and reconcile processes.
- **The Macros**: A research preview product that lets power users create custom AI macros for repetitive professional tasks.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – $21.5M (May 2026 round led by Walden Catalyst Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, AME Cloud Ventures, AICONIC VENTURES); earlier $5M seed round (April 2025) led by General Catalyst.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: General Catalyst, Walden Catalyst Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, AICONIC VENTURES
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Launched from stealth in March 2025 with Metamodel 1
  - Raised $21.5M within 14 months of founding
  - Operations in 7 countries (US, Kazakhstan, India, Canada, Germany, Ukraine, Georgia)
  - 2,574 LinkedIn followers (+141% YoY)
  - Active job postings for senior roles (Product Manager, Audit Consultant, Growth Lead)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Metamodel approach**: Enterprises can turn internal policies and employee knowledge into custom, on‑premise AI models, enforcing consistency and accuracy.
- **Evidence‑based reasoning**: The system explains exactly where it looked and why – building trust in regulated environments (SOC 2 Type II, AICPA audited infrastructure).
- **Small model efficiency**: Uses specialized small language models (SLMs) instead of massive general LLMs, making deployments faster, cheaper, and compliant with data sovereignty requirements.
- **End‑to‑end automation**: Covers the entire audit workflow – from raw database ingestion to boardroom‑ready reports – without any manual spreadsheet work.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale the Metamodel platform**: Turn enterprise policies into custom AI agents for every department.
- **Expand into adjacent compliance verticals** (tax, due diligence, contract governance).
- **Grow the team** across engineering, product, and go‑to‑market roles (currently 39–50 employees, with a heavy technical tilt of ~45%).
- **Maintain on‑premises / hybrid cloud deployments** to meet strict regulatory requirements of audit and finance clients.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Fast‑paced research‑first environment assembling a “world‑class team” to solve high‑stakes scaling challenges in AI reasoning.
- **Work model**: Hybrid workspace (Palo Alto offices); many roles are in‑office for close collaboration on complex ML and product work.
- **Team composition**: Heavy technical concentration (45% of staff are engineers/researchers), with deep domain expertise from ex‑Dropbox, Bloomberg, McKinsey, and AI labs.
- **Impact**: Build infrastructure that gives audit, compliance, and finance professionals their time back – directly reduces manual drudgery in multi‑billion‑dollar compliance markets.
- **Perks**: Not explicitly detailed, but the company emphasizes “autonomy, impact, and working on the hardest AI problems in enterprise.”

## Sources
1. [nace.ai](https://nace.ai/)
2. [nace.ai/careers](https://nace.ai/careers)
3. [LinkedIn – Nace AI](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nace-ai)
4. [Built In – Nace.AI](https://builtin.com/company/nace-ai)
5. [Jobs.ashbyhq.com – Nace AI](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/nace.ai)

## Other roles at Nace AI

- [VP of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-engineering-nace-ai-palo-alto-q8d26ckgppqq) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Senior MLOps Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-mlops-engineer-nace-ai-palo-alto-x8adzytpzn63) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Senior Product Designer (AI & Prototyping)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-designer-ai-prototyping-nace-ai-palo-alto-g533v3r04kqy) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Financial Audit Consultant](https://feeny.ai/job/financial-audit-consultant-nace-ai-palo-alto-xd0vjpcf326t) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Senior Technical Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-technical-recruiter-nace-ai-palo-alto-w9tkfpeqqv2f) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Growth Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-marketing-lead-nace-ai-palo-alto-7bw1bwfdqydv) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Valuation Due Diligence Expert](https://feeny.ai/job/valuation-due-diligence-expert-nace-ai-palo-alto-c51g3m2xy7q0) — Palo Alto, CA
- [SOX Audit Expert](https://feeny.ai/job/sox-audit-expert-nace-ai-palo-alto-3tznenh4xa5w) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Senior Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-manager-nace-ai-palo-alto-vsa8p0mak591) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Tax Consultant](https://feeny.ai/job/tax-consultant-nace-ai-palo-alto-hryt0rr498zw) — Palo Alto, CA