Senior Program Manager

W2 ONLY - NO 3RD PARTY CANDIDATES - NO VISA SPONSOR/TRANSFER - NO CORP'S - NO RELOCATION

The Senior Program Manager is the central execution leader for the program. This is not a strategic advisory role — it is a hands-on, delivery-focused leadership position that requires daily engagement in execution management, cross-track coordination, governance enforcement, and stakeholder communication. The Senior Program Manager will be the person who makes the delivery model work — translating strategy into daily, weekly, and monthly operating rhythm.

This role is accountable for:

• Owning the integrated program plan across all tracks — schedule, dependencies, milestones, and critical path
• Driving the daily and weekly execution cadence — standups, iteration planning, demos, retrospectives
• Enforcing entry/exit gates between delivery phases — no development starts without readiness criteria being met
• Managing cross-track dependencies and sequencing — ensuring parallel and sequenced tracks do not destabilize each other
• Owning the SteerCo agenda, pre-read, and follow-up — ensuring the steering committee is a decision engine, not a status meeting
• Driving the re-baselining effort — establishing velocity baselines and validating the target delivery date within the first 90 days
• Owning risk, issue, and action management — surfacing problems early, escalating with recommendations, and driving resolution
• Managing the operating rhythm across US-based and India-based teams — including enforcing the guided execution model for offshore delivery
• Partnering with the Business Sponsor (acting Product Owner) to ensure decisions are made, documented, and translated into stable requirements
• Preparing executive-ready reporting — program status, quality metrics, velocity trends, risk dashboards — for delivery leadership and senior stakeholders

Skills:

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Key Responsibilities

Program Execution & Delivery

• Own the integrated program plan across all active and sequenced tracks. Maintain schedule accuracy, dependency mapping, and critical path visibility.
• Drive iteration planning, execution tracking, and completion reviews for each 2-week iteration cycle. Ensure work entering each iteration has met defined readiness criteria.
• Enforce the Structured Iterative delivery model — phases, gates, and change control. Prevent the program from reverting to ad hoc or unstructured execution patterns.
• Lead the re-baselining effort: establish velocity baselines from the first 2–3 iterations, validate the integrated schedule against actual throughput, and recommend date adjustments with supporting data.
• Monitor and manage track sequencing: ensure sequenced tracks do not enter build until predecessor tracks meet defined exit criteria.
• Own change control: ensure all mid-build requirement changes are documented, impact-assessed, and approved before integration into the next iteration.

Cross-Track Coordination & Dependency Management

• Run the weekly cross-track program sync to identify and resolve inter-track dependencies, resource conflicts, and scheduling risks.
• Maintain an integrated dependency map across all tracks and surface conflicts proactively — before they become blockers.
• Coordinate with Solution Architects and Lead Developers to ensure technical dependencies (shared components, APIs, data flows) are sequenced correctly.
• Align business-side and technology-side PMs to ensure consistent planning, communication, and status reporting.

Governance & Escalation

• Own the SteerCo process end-to-end: agenda development, pre-read distribution (48 hours prior), meeting facilitation, decision capture, and follow-up tracking. The SteerCo is structured as a decision forum — not a status review.
• Prepare and present at the bi-weekly Delivery Leadership Review — covering program health, velocity trends, quality metrics, risks, and resource issues.
• Own the program-level Risk / Issue / Action log. Ensure risks are identified early, escalated with impact assessments and recommendations, and driven to resolution.
• Define and enforce escalation paths: track-level → program-level → delivery leadership → SteerCo, with clear timelines and ownership at each level.

Distributed Team Management

• Manage the operating rhythm across US-based and India-based teams. Ensure the guided execution model is functioning: US leads complex work, India executes well-defined tasks under US leadership.
• Ensure daily handoff processes are effective between US and India teams — morning standups, blocker resolution, code review follow-ups.
• Monitor the quality and throughput of offshore delivery. Partner with Lead Developers and Solution Architects to ensure work assignments match team capability.
• Identify and address distributed team inefficiencies — communication gaps, timezone friction, unclear ownership — before they impact delivery.

Stakeholder Communication & Reporting

• Serve as the primary point of contact for program delivery status across business and technology stakeholders.
• Produce weekly and bi-weekly program status reports — clear, concise, and executive-ready.
• Partner with the Business PM to align business readiness, UAT coordination, and stakeholder communication.
• Build and maintain program dashboards covering velocity, quality, risk, and milestone tracking.