Influence without authority

This is the whole job and the JD says so directly. A Cursor TPM holds senior technical leaders accountable to commitments without managing any of them. There is no thick layer to escalate through, so the lever is credibility, not the org chart.

Authority is the cheap version of influence - it works until the moment someone outranks you or simply doesn't care about your deadline. What actually moves an ML lead who has ten things more interesting than your cost program is that you are reliable, prepared and right often enough to be worth listening to.